Having gathered along one fence, she turned to cross to the opposite fence.  Midway in the glade she came upon the tramp.  Her startle was merely a startle.  There was no fear in it.  She stood and looked long and curiously at the forbidding spectacle, and was about to turn back when the sleeper moved restlessly and rolled his hand among the burrs.  She noted the sun on his face, and the buzzing flies; her face grew solicitous, and for a moment she debated with herself.  Then she tiptoed to his side, interposed the parasol between him and the sun, and brushed away the flies.  After a time, for greater ease, she sat down beside him.

An hour passed, during which she occasionally shifted the parasol from one tired hand to the other.  At first the sleeper had been restless, but, shielded from the flies and the sun, his breathing became gentler and his movements ceased.  Several times, however, he really frightened her.  The first was the worst, coming abruptly and without warning.  “Christ!  How deep!  How deep!” the man murmured from some profound of dream.  The parasol was agitated; but the little girl controlled herself and continued her self-appointed ministrations.

Another time it was a gritting of teeth, as of some intolerable agony.  So terribly did the teeth crunch and grind together that it seemed they must crush into fragments.  A little later he suddenly stiffened out.  The hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream.  The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to open, but did not.  Instead, the lips muttered: 

“No; no!  And once more no.  I won’t peach.”  The lips paused, then went on.  “You might as well tie me up, warden, and cut me to pieces.  That’s all you can get outa me—­blood.  That’s all any of you-uns has ever got outa me in this hole.”

After this outburst the man slept gently on, while the little girl still held the parasol aloft and looked down with a great wonder at the frowsy, unkempt creature, trying to reconcile it with the little part of life that she knew.  To her ears came the cries of men, the stamp of hoofs on the bridge, and the creak and groan of wagons heavy laden.  It was a breathless California Indian summer day.  Light fleeces of cloud drifted in the azure sky, but to the west heavy cloud banks threatened with rain.  A bee droned lazily by.  From farther thickets came the calls of quail, and from the fields the songs of meadow larks.  And oblivious to it all slept Ross Shanklin—­Ross Shanklin, the tramp and outcast, ex-convict 4379, the bitter and unbreakable one who had defied all keepers and survived all brutalities.