But now how gladly would he welcome it! For, in the sleeping-car, ill-smelling, close, and stuffy, he at least would have been surrounded by fellow-sufferers of his own species.

Here his companions were owls, water-snakes, and sleeping buzzards.
"I am alone," he told himself, "on a railroad embankment, entirely surrounded by alligators." And then he found he was not alone.
In the darkness, illuminated by a match, not a hundred yards from him there flashed suddenly the face of a man.

Then the match went out and the face with it.

David noted that it had appeared at some height above the level of the swamp, at an elevation higher even than that of the embankment.

It was as though the man had been sitting on the limb of a tree.