Until You Read online

  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?”

  “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. While her father and Dog Lies Sleeping made their more dignified way along the trail in the wagon, she galloped ahead, then raced back to them, crouched low over the horse’s neck, her hair tossing in the wind and mingling with the horse’s flying mane, her laughter ringing out beneath the bright blue sky. On the same day she conquered her fear of a racing gallop, she proudly asked Dog Lies Sleeping if she was beginning to ride as well as an Indian boy. He looked at her as if such a possibility were absurd, as well as impossible, then he tossed the core of the apple he’d been eating into the grass beside the road. “Can Wise for Years pick that up from back of running horse?” he replied, pointing to the core.

  “Of course not,” Sherry said, baffled.

  “Indian boy do.”

  In the three years that followed, Sherry learned to do that and a great many other feats—some of which evoked worried warnings from her father. Dog Lies Sleeping greeted each of her successes with an offhand grunt of approval, followed by yet another new, seemingly impossible, challenge, and sooner or later, Sherry rose to every one. Their income increased as a result of Dog Lies Sleeping’s intricate handiwork, and they ate much better as a result of his superior hunting and fishing skills. If people found them a peculiar trio—the old Indian, the young girl who wore deerskin pants and who could ride not only bareback and astride but backward at a full-out gallop, and the amiable, soft-spoken Irishman who gambled regularly but with cautious restraint—Sherry didn’t notice it. In fact, she rather thought the folk who lived in busy, crowded towns such as Baltimore, Augusta, and Charlotte led very odd, stifled lives compared to theirs. In fact, she didn’t mind in the least that her papa was taking so long to win enough money to build their mansion in the village of Sherwyn’s Glen.

  She mentioned that very thing to Raphael Benavente, a handsome, blue-eyed Spaniard in his mid-twenties, a few days after he decided to travel with them toward Savannah on his way from St. Augustine.

  “Cara mia,” he had said, laughing heartily. “It is good you are not in a hurry, for your papa is a very bad gambler. I sat across from him last night in a little game at Madame Gertrude’s establishment, and there was much cheating.”

  “My papa would never cheat!” she’d protested, leaping to her feet in indignation.

  “No, this I believe,” he quickly assured her, catching her wrist as she whirled around. “But he did not realize that others were cheating.”

  “You should have—” her eyes dropped to the gun he wore at his hip, and she grew even angrier at the idea of someone cheating her papa out of their hard-earned money—“shot them! Yes, shot them all, that’s what!”

  “That I could not do, querida,” he stated, while amusement again lit his face. “Because, you see, I was one of the cheaters.”

  Sheridan yanked her wrist free. “You cheated my papa?”

  “No, no,” he said, making an unsuccessful effort to sober his expression. “I only cheat when it is entirely necessary—such as when others are cheating—and I only cheat those who would cheat me.”

  As she later learned, Raphael was something of an expert at gambling, having been, by his own admission, cast out of his family’s huge hacienda in Mexico as punishment for what he called his “many bad ways.”

  Sheridan, who prized her own tiny family, was dismayed to discover that some parents actually cast their children out, and she was equally dismayed at the thought that Raphael might have committed some sort of unspeakable deed to warrant that. When she cautiously broached the subject to her father, he put his arm reassuringly around her shoulders and said that Raphael had explained the real reason he’d been sent away by his family, and that it had something to do with caring too much for a lady who was unfortunately already married.

  Sheridan accepted his explanation without further question, not only because her father was always very careful about the character of any man allowed to travel with them for an extended length of time, but also because she wanted to think the best of Raphael. Although she was only twelve years old, she was positive Raphael Benavente was the handsomest and most charming man on earth—with the exception of her father, of course.

  He told her wonderful stories, teased her about her ruffian ways, and told her that she was going to be a very, very beautiful woman someday. He said her eyes were as cool as gray storm clouds and that God had given them to her to go with the