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 own town and contesting, as well, the grim advances made by the relentless Reaper. In travels that have taken me over a good slice of Mother Earth, and that have brought me into contact with all sorts and conditions of men, I have never met one whose friendship I would rather have than that of John H. Cady. If I were asked to sum him up I would say that he is a _true_ man--a true father, a true and courageous fighter, and a true American. He is a man anybody would far sooner have with him than against him in a controversy. If so far as world-standards go he has not achieved fame--I had rather call it "notoriety"--it is because of the fact that the present-day standards do not fit the men whom they ignore. With those other men who were the wet-nurses of the West in its infantile civilization, this hardy pioneer should be honored by the present generation and his name handed down to posterity as that of one who fought the good fight of progress, and fought well, with weapons which if perhaps crude and clumsy--as the age was crude and clumsy judged by Twentieth Century standards--were at least most remarkably effective.