midnight
CHAPTER XXVI . -LSB- Illustration -RSB- Few there are who have not heard of the Magic City , the Windy Wonder of the West , the Peerless Princess of the Plains , and how it sprung up mushroom-like in a night there at the forks of the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas , where the Indians had pitched their tents and Seth had lived and hoped and despaired , and how men went wild erecting Colleges and Palaces and Temples and Watch Factories and buying up town lots so far from the town that if the city had been built on all of them it would have surpassed the marvellous tales of it written in the newspapers , reached half way to Denver and become , instead of the Magic City of the West , the Magic City of the World . Seth had been a dreamer of dreams , but his vision of the Magic City was not half so marvellous as the city itself . Fortunes were made in a day and lost before midnight . Men came from far and near , many from the other side of the water , and bought town lots and sold them , bought still others and built tall houses and planted great avenues of trees , cottonwood trees , the trees of Seth 's imaginings , trees that seemed also to spring up in a night , they grew so magically , thrusting deep roots into the moist black soil and greedily sucking up its moisture in a very madness of growing , and laid off parks and sent flashing electric cars out into the large farms and dangled big soft balls of electricity in the middle of the streets that twinkled at eventide like big pale blinking fireflies . Those who had formerly eked out a precarious enough existence in dugouts , now lived in palaces , had their raiment fashioned by hands Parisian , and gave receptions on a scale of such grandeur that the flowers offered as souvenirs thereat would have kept many a wolf from a dugout door for years , and a few Wise Men it was said lost their heads in the mad whirl of speculation , but as that often happens in the building up of any great city , not necessarily in the West , it was not so surprising as it might have been . Indeed , the World stood still a moment , agape at the wonder of the Magic City , and there were those who , now that Seth had passed out of the way of the wind into a country strange to them , spoke of him reverently as Prophet and Seer , going so far as to express regret that while within the sound of their voices they had carelessly dubbed him a foolish dreamer of mad , fantastic and impossible dreams , yet comforting themselves withal with the thought that they were not alone in denying a Prophet honor in his own country , since so wagged the world .