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?"