When he reached the lower floor, he found several men lounging about in another poorly furnished room, and they were all similar in appearance to the men he had seen at the door the night before.  They looked at him in an indifferent way, and didn’t seem surprised that he should be walking about without restraint.  Bill Hickson stepped up to some of them, and, after a few words in some language Archie didn’t understand, motioned for the boy to step up.  He was told to shake hands with “all the gents,” and after he had done so he was offered a cigar, and Archie began to realise that it was a very good thing that he had a friend at the Filipino court.  He thought, too, that if these men were samples, Aguinaldo had a very poor lot of retainers, and later on he perceived the real cause for the failure of the rebels to do anything more than keep up a constant retreat.  It was plain to see that the followers of the rebel leader were “in it for what it was worth.”  They had no difficulty, any of them, in getting enough to eat, and often they had opportunities to enjoy themselves in great fashion by taking possession of some Filipino village and ejecting the inmates of some particularly fine house, with a well-stocked wine-cellar.

In looking out of the window Archie perceived that the town looked very different this morning than when he saw it the evening before.  Instead of drawn blinds and shuttered windows, there was everywhere an evident attempt at decoration in honour of the coming army.  The streets were crowded with a throng in holiday garb, and some of the soldiers of the rebel army had already arrived, as they could be easily distinguished by their ragged dress and ridiculous airs, walking up and down the street.  It was all such a scene as Archie had never seen before, and would have made a great success as the scenario for a comic opera.  But as a welcome to an army, supposedly victorious, it was a dismal failure, and Archie wondered what General Aguinaldo would think when he entered the town and saw such shoddy patriotism everywhere.  He hadn’t long to wait, however, before seeing the famous rebel and the effect upon him of the celebration in his honour.  It was about ten o’clock in the morning when he rode into the public square, followed by about two hundred ragged Filipinos, armed with all sorts of guns and pistols.  Archie saw the arrival from the roof of the building which was his mock prison, and he could scarcely refrain from laughing outright when he saw the boasted Filipino “army.”  It was the poorest excuse for a body of troops that he could imagine.