Refuse to bring the joy.

Amid great privations the marching column crossed the mountains and
the fertile plains on the opposite side, to the city of San Isidro. It
was heralded in advance that the Americans were coming through the
country. Obeying their greatest national instinct--curiosity--the
natives assembled by thousands in the villages along the road. Every
one of them kept crowding forward to get to touch the Americans to see
what their skins felt like. Others were looking for the long feathers
in their hair, which they had heard so much about. It was all the
Filipino guards could do to restrain their own people. The latter,
like monkeys, jabbered incessantly. Gilmore's men hurled back at them
defiant epithets. They realized that involuntarily they had become
the chief actors in a new moving circus.

Again, when they reached San Isidro, a great throng of curious natives
had come to town to see them. These fellows were very hostile to the
Americans. It was all the native guard could do to keep the Filipinos
from doing violence to them. Gilmore was again questioned at length
and then he was separated from his comrades and all were hurried off
to jail.

In a few days it was rumored that the American army was approaching the
city. Aguinaldo and his associates hurriedly prepared to leave. Orders
were given to march the prisoners overland north and then westward
across another range of high mountains to Arancay, on the western
coast of Luzon,--a distance of 100 miles.

This time the crowd of prisoners was greatly increased. At San
Isidro there were added 600 Spaniards; a small tribe of mountain
Negritos whom Aguinaldo had originally sent to fight the Americans,
but who, being armed only with spears and bolos, soon got tired of
seeing their number decrease so rapidly before American riflemen,
and refused to fight, and who were later imprisoned and terribly
misused by Aguinaldo's selected guards; and eighteen Americans in
addition to Gilmore's party (total twenty-six Americans), who had
been captured in as many different ways around Manila by the crafty,
cunning Filipinos. Among them was Frank Stone, of the U. S. Signal
Corps, captured by some "amigos" (friendly natives) on the railroad
track near Manila, while out strolling one Sunday afternoon; Private
Curran, of the 16th U.S. Infantry who was grabbed within fifty feet
of his own outpost, gagged and dragged into captivity; also a civilian
who ha