nine o'clock
Few and far between were these , for the natives were encouraged to remain indoors after nine o'clock , and the soldiers forbidden to be out . The streets were deserted save by occasional carriage or carromatta bearing army or navy officers , or what were termed the foreign residents -- English or German as a rule -- from club or calls to their quarters . `` Lights out '' sounded early at the barracks of the soldiery , for they were up with the dawn for breakfast that they might be through with their hardest drills before the heat of the day . The `` pool rooms , '' as the big _ Americanos _ called these `` wide open , '' single-tabled billiard saloons that flourished in almost every block , were required to put up their shutters at nine o'clock , and every discoverable establishment in which gambling had prevailed in other form had long since been closed by a stony-hearted chief of police , whose star was worn on each shoulder rather than the left breast , and who , to the incredulous amaze of Spaniard and Filipino alike , listened unmoved to the pleas of numerous prominent professors of the gambling industry , even when backed by proffers of a thousand a week in gold . That the '' _ partida de billar _ '' had not also been suppressed was due to the fact that , like Old Sledge in the Kentucky Court , its exponents established it to be , not a game of chance , but skill , and such , indeed , it proved to every Yankee who put up his money against the bank . With an apparently congenital gift of sleight of hand , developed by years of practice at pitch penny from toddling babyhood to cock-fighting adolescence , the native could so manipulate the tools of his game that no outsider had the faintest `` show for his money , '' while , as against each other , as when Greek met Greek , it became a battle of the giants , a trial of almost superhuman skill . It was the one game left to adult Tagalhood in which he might indulge his all-absorbing and unconquerable passion to play for money .