Steampunked Read Free

made a fool out of myself looking at her. She is half my age.”
    “I meant your wife, but yes, the girl is a beauty. And she has a way with her eyes, don’t you think?”
    Hickok grunted agreement. He felt like a school boy who had been caught looking up the teacher’s dress.
    “I was looking too,” Cody said cheerfully. “You see, I don’t care for my wife much. You?”
    “I want to, but she is not making it easy. We’re like two trains on different tracks. We pass close enough to wave, but never close enough to touch.”
    “My God, friend, but you are a poet.”
    “I didn’t mean to be.”
    “Well, mean to. I could use a bit of color and poetry in my life.”
    “An ambassador is more colorful than a clerk.”
    “An ambassador is little more than a clerk who travels. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I just don’t feel tailored to it.”
    “Then we are both cut from the wrong cloth, Cody.”
    Hickok finished his cigarette and looked out into the night. The shapes of the cherry trees flew by, looked like multi-armed men waving gentle goodbyes.
    “It seems I have done nothing with my life,” Hickok said after a while, and he did not look at Cody when he said it. He continued to watch the night and the trees. “Today when you told me about Custer and Yoshii, I did not feel sadness. Surprise, but not sadness. Now I know why. I envy them. Not their deaths, but their glory. A hundred years from now, probably more, they will be remembered. I will be forgotten a month after my passing-if it takes that long.”
    Cody reached over and opened a window. The wind felt cool and comfortable. He tapped his pipe on the outside of the train. Sparks flew from it and blew down the length of the cars like fireflies in a blizzard. Cody left the window open, returned his pipe to his pocket.
    “You know,” Cody said, “I wanted to go out West during the Japanese wars: the time the Japanese were trying to push down into Colorado on account of the gold we’d found there, and on account of we’d taken the place away from them back when it was part of New Japan. I was young then and I should have gone. I wanted to be a soldier. I might have been a great scout, or a buffalo hunter, had my life gone different then.”
    “Do you sometimes wonder that your dreams are your real life, Cody? That if you hope for them enough they become solid? Maybe our dreams are our trains not taken.”
    “Come again.”
    “Our possible futures. The thing we might have done had we just edged our lives another way.”
    “I hadn’t thought much about it actually, but I like the sound of it.”
    “Will you laugh if I tell you my dream?”
    “How could I? I’ve just told you mine.”
    “I dream that I’m a gunman-and with these light-sensitive eyes that’s a joke. But that’s what I am. One of those long-haired shootists like in the Dime Novels, or that real-life fellow Wild Jack McCall. I even dream of lying face down on a card table, my pistol career ended by some skulking knave who didn’t have the guts to face me and so shot me from behind. It’s a good dream, even with the death, because I am remembered, like those soldiers who sided at The Little Big Horn. It’s such a strong dream I like to believe that it is actually happening somewhere, and that I am that man that I would rather be.”
    “I think I understand you, friend. I even envy Morse and these damn trains; him and his telegraph and ‘pulsating energy.’ Those discoveries will make him live forever. Every time a message is flashed across the country or a train bullets along on the crackling power of its fire line, it’s like thousands of people crying his name.”
    “Sometimes-a lot of the time-I just wish that for once I could live a dream.”
    They sat in silence. The night and the shadowed limbs of the cherry trees fled by, occasionally mixed with the staggered light of the moon and the stars.
    Finally Cody said, “To bed. Cherrywood is an early stop.” He opened his