, set like a rare exotic in the
humble window of his hut.

It was not her fault. It was his. It was his place to turn the hut
into a palace for his Queen; and so he would, when the Wise Men came
out of the East and built the Magic City.

When the Fools had made the plains a fit place for human beings to
inhabit, planting trees to draw down the reluctant rain from the
clouds, sowing seed and raising crops sometimes, to their surprise and
the amazement of those who heard of it, the Wise Men would appear and
buy the land, and the building of great cities would begin.

Already they had reared a town that dared approach in size to a city
on the edge of the desert, but what had happened?

An angry cyclone, hearing of it, had come along and snatched it into
the clouds.

Furious at sight of its spick and span newness, its yellow frame
shanties and shining shingles, it had carried it off as if it had
been a hen coop and set it down somewhere in Texas, a state that had
been longer settled and was therefore a better place for houses and
fences, and left it there.

Then the Wise Men, growing discouraged, had gone away.

But they would come again, he promised himself. They would come again.
They must. Not to pass through in long vestibule trains whose sparks
out of pure fiendishness lighted the furious prairie fires that were
so hard to put out, smothering the innocent occupants of the dugouts
in their sleep and burning their grain. Not to gaze wild-eyed through
the shining windows of these splendid cars as they passed on and on to
some more promising unwind-blown country, to build there their
beautiful cities of marble and of stone.

They would come to stay.

When?

Why, when they should find a spot unvisited by cyclones, and that spot
would be in the place of their dugout at the forks of these two
rivers, the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, the little river
that had real water trickling along its shallow bed year in and year
out, and the Big river whose bed was dry as a bone all the year round
until June, when the melting snows of the Rockies sent the water down
in floods.

In fierce, uncontrollable and pitiless floods to drown the crops that
had been spared by the chinch bugs, the grasshoppers and the Hot
Winds.

All this Seth told Celia, finishing with his old rapturous picture of
the glory of the Magic City, which he called after the old witch who
had driven the winds from the forks of the rivers, Wichita