of the pioneers
carved a way of peace for the pilgrims of today!

Considering the foregoing, such a book as this, presenting as it does in
readable form the Arizona West as it _really was_, is, in my opinion,
most opportune and fills a real need. The people have had fiction
stories from the capable pens of Stewart Edward White and his companions
in the realm of western literature, and have doubtless enjoyed their
refreshing atmosphere and daring originality, but, despite this, fiction
localized in the West and founded however-much on fact, does _not_
supply all the needs of the Eastern reader, who demands the truth about
those old days, presented in a compact and _intimate_ form. I cannot too
greatly emphasize that word "intimate," for it signifies to me the
quality that has been most lacking in authoritative works on the Western
country.

When I first met Captain Cady I found him the very personification of
what he ought not to have been, considering the fact that he is one of
the oldest pioneers in Arizona. Instead of peacefully awaiting the close
of a long and active career in some old soldiers' home, I found him
energetically superintending the hotel he owns at Patagonia, Santa Cruz
county--and with a badly burned hand, at that. There he was, with a
characteristic chef's top-dress on him (Cady is well known as a
first-class cook), standing behind the wood-fire range himself,
permitting no one else to do the cooking, allowing no one else to
shoulder the responsibilities that he, as a man decidedly in the autumn
of life, should by all the rules of the "game" have long since
relinquished.

Where this grizzled old Indian fighter, near his three-score-and-ten,
should have been white-haired, he was but gray; where he should have
been inflicted with the kindred illnesses of advancing old age he simply
owned up, and sheepishly at that, to a burned hand. Where he should have
been willing to lay down his share of civic responsibility and let the
"young fellows" have a go at the game, he was as ever on the
firing-line, his name in the local paper a half-dozen times each week.
Oh, no, it is wrong to say that John H. Cady _was_ a fighter--wrong in
the spirit of it, for, you see, he is very much of a fighter, now. He
has lost not one whit of that aggressiveness and sterling courage that
he always has owned, the only difference being that, instead of fighting
Indians and bad men, he is now fighting the forces of evil within his