Charlotte with her bright, wary eyes, and the little animal with his, in the tree, became aware of another sentient thing besides themselves.  Possibly the squirrel had been aware of it all the time.

Suddenly the girl looked downward at her right and saw within a stone’s-throw a man asleep.  He was dressed in an ancient, greenish-brown suit, and was practically invisible.  His arm was thrown over his weather-beaten face and he was sleeping soundly, lying in a position as grotesquely distorted as some old tree-root.  He was, in fact, distorted by the storms of life within and without.  He was evidently a tramp, and possibly worse.  His sleeping face could be read like a page of evil lore.

When Charlotte perceived him she turned pale and her heart seemed to stop.  Her first impulse was to rise and make a mad rush for the road.  Then she became afraid to do that.  The road was lonely.  She heard no sound of wheels thereon.  It was true that she had entered the grove and seated herself without awakening the man; he might quite possibly be in a drunken sleep, difficult to disturb, but she might not be so fortunate a second time.  Her slightest motion might awaken him now.  So she sat perfectly still; she did not move a finger; it seemed to her she did not breathe.  When a slight breeze rustled the tree-boughs over her head, and ruffled the skirt of her dress, her terror made her sick.  When the breeze struck him, the sleeping tramp made an uneasy motion, and she felt overwhelmed.  Soon, however, he began to breathe heavily.  Before his breathing had been inaudible.  He was evidently quite soundly asleep, yet if a breeze could disturb him, what might not her rise and flight do?  It seemed to her that she must remain there forever.  But the time would come when that sleeping terror would awake, whether she disturbed him or not, when that distorted caricature of man, as grotesque as a gargoyle on the temple of life, would stretch those twisted legs and arms, and open his eyes and see her; and then?  She became sure, the longer she looked, that this was not one of the harmless wanderers over the earth, one of the Ishmaels, whose hand is turned only against himself.  The great dark, bloated face had a meaning that could not be mistaken even by eyes for whom its meaning was written in a strange language.  Innocence read guilt by a strange insight of heredity which came to her from the old beginning of things.  She dared not stir.  She felt petrified.  She realized that her one hope was in the passing of some one on the road.  She made up her mind that if she heard wheels she would risk everything.  She would spring up and run for her life and scream.  Then she wondered how loudly she could scream.  Charlotte was not one of the screaming kind of girls who lifts up her voice of panic at everything.  She tried to remember if she had ever screamed, and how loudly.  She kept her ears strained for the sound of wheels, her eyes on the sleeping tramp.  She dared not look away from him.  Even the squirrel remained motionless, with his round eyes of wariness fixed.  It was as if he too were afraid to stir.  He retained his attitude of alert grace, sitting erect on his little haunches, an acorn in his paws, his bushy tail arching over his back like a plume.