ss. He made his way from
tie to tie only by feeling with his foot. After an hour he came to a
shed. Whether it was or was not the flag station the conductor had in
mind, he did not know, and he never did know. He was too tired, too hot,
and too disgusted to proceed, and dropping his suit case he sat down
under the open roof of the shed prepared to wait either for the train
or daylight. So far as he could see, on every side of him stretched
a swamp, silent, dismal, interminable. From its black water rose dead
trees, naked of bark and hung with streamers of funereal moss. There was
not a sound or sign of human habitation. The silence was the silence of
the ocean at night David remembered the berth reserved for him on the
train to Tampa and of the loathing with which he had considered placing
himself between its sheets. 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. David crossed the tracks and found that on the side of the
embankment opposite the shed there was solid ground and what once had
been a wharf. He advanced over this cautiously, and as he did so the
clouds disappeared, and in the full light of the moon he saw a bayou
broadening into a river, and made fast to the decayed and rotting wharf
an ocean-going tug. It was from her deck that the man, in lighting his
pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the
company of his fellow creatures, David's heart leaped with pleasure.
He advanced quickly. And then something in the appearance of the tug,
something mysterious, secretive, threatening, caused him to halt. No
lights showed from her engine-room, cabin, or pilot-house. Her decks
were empty. But, as was evidenced by the black smoke that rose from
her funnel, she was awake and awake to some purpose. David stood
unc