She arrived in Havana harbour at eleven o'clock in the forenoon of January 25, 1898, and was duly saluted by the forts and the Spanish ships of war, whose salutes she as duly returned; after which, under the direction of the port authorities, she was moored in the man-o'-war anchorage. Nothing that could, even by the most hypersensitive, be construed into an act of discourteous behaviour was shown to either the officers or men of the ship; on the contrary, the Spaniards, no doubt shrewdly suspecting that the eye of the United States, quickened by recent events to a state of preternaturally acute perception, was suspiciously watching their every action, were at the greatest pains to exhibit the utmost courtesy, not only official but also non-official, to their visitors, to whom the officials and residents alike extended the most generous hospitality, in return for which several receptions were held on board the ship by Captain Sigsbee and his officers. Now it happened that on February 15th--which fell on a Tuesday--Don Hermoso Montijo, his son Carlos, and Jack Singleton, completely worn out by many months of campaigning among the mountains, and several sharp attacks of fever, having amalgamated their considerably augmented band with that of another insurgent leader, and turned the command over to him, succeeded in entering the city of Havana unrecognised, and made their way on board the _Thetis_--which had then been for some time lying idle in the harbour--with the intention of recruiting their health by running across the Atlantic for the purpose of procuring a further supply of arms and ammunition, which the continual accessions to the revolutionary ranks caused to be most urgently needed. They were most enthusiastically welcomed by Milsom, who, having heard nothing from any of them for more than three months, was beginning very seriously to fear that, like many others of the revolutionaries, they had been "wiped out" in one or another of the countless skirmishes that were constantly occurring with the Spanish troops. He was delighted to learn that they were all to make a run across the Atlantic and back together; and within an hour of their arrival on board set to work upon the necessary preparations for the trip, which, however, he explained, it would be scarcely possible to complete under a couple of days, in the then disordered state of the city, with its attendant disorganised business conditions. But, great as Milsom's pleasure at their appearance undoubtedly was, Singleton soon became aware of a certain subtle constraint and uneasiness in his friend's manner toward him; and as soon as he had satisfied himself that it really existed, and was not the result of his own imagination, he taxed his friend with it.