On his arrival in France, his theories were disputed by several physicians who still clung to the earlier doctrines. His most bitter opponent was Doctor Bathybius.

Dining with Elson in a restaurant one day, the doctor alleged, among other things, that he was certain he could detect an alcoholic tremor in his hand.

Old Elson’s only reply was to draw out his revolver and aim it at the push button of the electric bell.

“Merely a quick eye, you might object,” said he to the doctor. “Then please hold this menu card in front of my face.”

His hand did not move after the screen was interposed. He fired.

The weapon fired dumdum bullets. Nothing was left of the bell push, very little of the wall, and a few intermittent screams were heard from the neighboring compartment where a peaceful patron had been interrupted in the middle of his hors d’oeuvres. But, for a second, the electric push button, struck dead center, had transmitted an impulse to the bell.

The waiter appeared.

“Another bottle of alcohol,” Elson ordered.

Such was the man whose work had led him to the discovery of Perpetual Motion Food.

Having at length produced his Perpetual Motion Food, it was not an unprecedented event when William Elson, together with Arthur Gough, decided to launch his product by a great race between a bicycle team, whose only food it was to be, and an express train. In America, from the last few years of the nineteenth century, five- and six-man bicycle teams had many times beaten express trains over one or two miles. What was unheard of, though, was the claim that the human mechanism was superior to the machine over long distances. The fine confidence in his discovery that his success afterward inspired in William Elson was to bring him little by little to share André Marcueil’s ideas on the limitlessness of human strength. Yet, as a practical man, he could only judge it limitless with the aid of his Perpetual Motion Food.

As for the question of whether or not André Marcueil took part in the race, although Miss Elson was convinced that she had recognized him there, that we leave to be judged from this chapter. For greater precision, we shall take our account of this race, known as the Perpetual Motion Food Race, or the Ten-Thousand-Mile Race, from one of the members of the five-man bicycle team, Ted Oxborrow, as reported by and published in the New York Herald:

Lying horizontally on the five-man bicycle – standard 1920 racing model, no handle bars, fifteen-millimeter tires, development 57.34 meters – our faces lower than our saddles, sheltered behind masks from wind and dust, our ten legs joined on either side by aluminum rods, we started off down the interminable, 10,000-mile-long track that had been prepared alongside the lines of the great express. At first we were towed by a bullet-shaped car at the provisional speed of 120 kilometers per hour.