The liberated prisoner, although he, too, was weak and worn as all of his companions were, yet rushed with rapid strides from side to side of the excited mob whose clamor, now released, quite filled the prado with vociferous shouts of joy, until he seemed to find the object of his hasty search, for, when he came to where Estrella lay supported by her little friend upon a hastily constructed bed of straw and grass, he stooped above her anxiously and leaned to look within her face, but, when her wide and terror-stricken eyes looked into his, he turned away as if he had not found the one he was in search of after all. Estrella raised herself upon one elbow and rested on the ready shoulder of her little friend while she gazed after his retreating form with an eagerness not unmixed with sudden fear; it seemed as if the girl were fascinated by him, and, yet, dreaded his approach, for she did not even speak to him although she knew that he had been one of those whom they had come to liberate and had looked forward to greeting him when he should be released. But the horror that had been thrust upon her at the very entrance of that dark and gloomy prison had quite unnerved her and had made her shrink from any contact with the prisoners who, now, came trooping out and mingled with the crowd by which they were soon, as it seemed, absorbed. Then, suddenly, a trumpet blast rang through the wide and spacious prado and a company of mounted cavalry, with naked swords uplifted, rode madly in among the crowd and scattered it as chaff is scattered by a furious wind ... cries of agony were heard as some were trampled by the horses, tortured by the cruel spurs which their infuriated riders were driving into their tender skins, and many men and women fell into disordered heaps of human misery in wildly scrambling toward a place of temporary safety. The soldiers gave no quarter to the fleeing masses of the people but kept driving all of them who stood upon their feet at all toward the open streets of the little village that led out of the prado, ordering them to cease from disturbing the peace and calling upon them in the name of the young King, Alfonso XIII, to disperse at once and to return to their homes in the village without delay. The most of those within the prado had been driven out before the commanding officer of the soldiers noticed that the prison doors were open, even then, at first he did not perceive just what the crowd had been collected for, or he might have given other orders than he had. When he beheld the broken doors he marvelled greatly, for this was an unlooked-for and unprecedented method of liberating political prisoners in San Domingo and the commanding officer did not know just what action to take in the matter but felt that he must wait for further orders from his superiors in command before taking any drastic steps to quell the evident uprising of public opinion.