wink, he finished, "What if I say you misremembered the song, and it's really the Italians who cry?"
He'd phrased all that as if it were part of their favorite game of " What If ," a game they'd invented and played often to pass the time during the three years they'd travelled together. Sometimes the game was about serious possibilities, such as "What if the horse went lame." Sometimes it was silly, like "What if a fairy came and gave us one wish," but regardless of the premise, the goal was always to reach the best possible solution in the minimum amount of time. Sheridan had become so good at it that her father proudly declared that she made him work hard to stay even with her.
Sheridan's brow furrowed in concentration for a brief moment, then she announced her solution with a merry giggle: "I think you'd best pretend there's something you have to do right now, so you don't have to answer the question. If you say anything at all, it will land you in the briars for sure."
"You're right," he said, laughing, then he took her advice after bidding Dog Lies Sleeping a polite goodnight. The lighthearted exchange didn't win even a glimmer of a smile from the stoic Indian, but across the fire, he gave Sheridan a long, intense look, then rolled to his feet and vanished into the woods for the night without a word.
The following morning, Dog Lies Sleeping offered to let her ride his horse-an honor that Sheridan suspected sprang from his desire to ride in the more comfortable wagon without actually having to admit it, and thereby save face. Sheridan, who had never ridden anything but the old, swaybacked horse that pulled their wagon, eyed the beautiful, spirited animal with a little excitement and a great deal of nervous panic. She was about to refuse when she caught the challenging look in the Indian's face. Carefully injecting a regretful tone into her voice, she pointed out that they didn't have a saddle. Dog Lies Sleeping gave her another of his lofty, superior looks and informed her that Indian maidens rode bareback and astride.
His unblinking stare, combined with the feeling that he knew she was afraid, was more than Sheridan could endure. Prepared to risk her life and limb rather than give him a reason to have a low opinion of her, and all Irish children as well, she marched over to him and took the horse's rope from his hand. He didn't offer to help her mount, so she led the horse over to the wagon, climbed into it, then spent several minutes trying to maneuver the horse into a position close enough to swing her leg over its back.
Once she was mounted, she wished she weren't. From atop the horse, the ground looked very far away, and very, very hard. She fell off five times that day, and she could practically feel the Indian and his obstinate horse laughing at her. As she prepared to mount for her sixth attempt, she was so furious and so sore that she jerked on the lead rope, grabbed the horse's ear and called him a devil, using a German word for it that she'd been taught by a German couple heading for Pennsylvania, then she hoisted herself aboard and angrily took command of her mount. It took several minutes before she realized that Indian horses apparently responded better to rudeness than timidity, because the animal stopped sidestepping and bolting and settled into an exhilarating soft trot.
That night, as she sat at the campfire watching her father cooking their supper, she shifted her position to ease the pressure on her sore backside and inadvertently met the gaze of Dog Lies Sleeping, something she'd been avoiding since she'd retied the horse to the wagon earlier that day. Instead of making some embarrassingly frank observation about her lack of riding ability in comparison to that of an Indian girl's, Dog Lies Sleeping looked at her steadily in the leaping firelight and asked what seemed an entirely inconsequential question: "What does your name mean?"
"What does my name mean?" she repeated after a moment's thought.
When he nodded, she explained that she'd been named for a flower that grew in her mother's land of England, a place across the sea. He made a disapproving grunt, and Sheridan was so startled that she said, "Well, then, what should my name be?"
"Not flower, you," he said, studying her freckled face and unruly hair. "Fire, you. Flames. Burn bright."
"What? Oh!" she said, laughing as understanding dawned. "You mean my hair looks like it's on fire because of its color?" Despite his aloof manner, abrupt speech, and ill-behaved horse, Sheridan was, as usual, naturally friendly, incurably curious, and incapable of carrying a grudge for more than an hour. "My papa calls me 'carrot'
because of my hair," she said with a smile. "A carrot is an orange vegetable like like corn is a vegetable," she added. "That is why he calls me 'carrot.' "
"White men are not as good as Indians for giving names."
Politely refraining from pointing out that being named for a dog wasn't exactly preferable to being referred to as a vegetable, Sheridan said, "What sort of name would an Indian give me?"