"Hair of Flames," he announced. "If you were boy, name you Wise for Years."

"What?" Sheridan asked blankly.

"You wise already," he clarified awkwardly. "Wise, but not old. Young."

"Oh, I do like being called wise!" Sheridan exclaimed, instantly reversing her earlier decision and deciding she liked him very well, indeed. "Wise for Years," she repeated, tossing a happy look at her amused father.

"You girl," he contradicted, dampening her glee with his attitude of male superiority. "Girls not wise. Call you Hair of Flames."

Sheridan decided to like him anyway and to stifle her indignant retort that her papa thought she was very smart indeed, contrary to his opinion. "Hair of Flames is a very nice name," she said instead.

He smiled then for the first time, a knowing smile that took decades off his face and made it clear he was aware of her restraint in the face of his provocation. "You Wise for Years," he said, his grin widening as he looked at her papa and nodded.

Her father nodded his agreement in return, and Sheridan decided, as she often did, that life was really quite wonderfully exhilarating, and that no matter how different people seemed on the outside, on the inside they were much the same. They liked to laugh and talk and dream… and pretend that they were always brave, never in pain, and that sorrow was merely a bad mood that would soon pass. And which usually did.

5

At breakfast the next morning, her father complimented the beautiful braided and beaded belt that Dog Lies Sleeping wore around his deerskin breeches and discovered that the Indian had made it himself. Within moments, a business deal was struck, and Dog Lies Sleeping agreed to fashion belts and bracelets for her father to sell along their route.

With their new "partner's" permission, she named the horse Runs Fast, and in the days that followed, Sheridan rode him constantly.