Behind my back, and a little to the left, he lit an acetylene lamp which oddly cast, in front of us and somewhat to our right (the locomotive now being on our left), the fivefold shadow of our team on the white track.

In the cheerful light. the dwarf was no longer complaining. And we kept pace with our shadow.

I no longer had any idea how fast we were going. I tried to catch a few snatches of the silly little songs Sammy White was humming to himself to keep his pedaling in time. Just before the speedometer needle had gone up in flames he had been jabbering the refrain, like a burst of hail, of his final sprint, so well-known from his record-breaking mile and half-mile races on the hairpin tracks of Massachusetts: Poor Papa paid Peter’s potatoes!5

Beyond that he would have had to improvise, but his legs were going too quickly for his brain.

Thought, at least Sammy White’s, is not so rapid as they say, and I can’t see it going on exhibition on any track.

There is really only one record that it will be a long time before either Sammy White, the world champion, or I, or our five-man team, will beat; the record of light, and I have seen it beaten with my own eyes. When the lamp was lit behind us, sweeping our shadow forward along the track, the five members of our shadow were grouped for an instant so as to seem, fifty yards in front of us, like a single racer seen from behind, riding in front of us. Our simultaneous pedal strokes completed the illusion – which I heard afterwards was not an illusion. When our shadow was thrown forward we all felt sharply and distinctly that some silent and unbeatable opponent, who must have been watching us for days, had taken off on our right at the same time as our shadow, hidden within it, and kept fifty yards ahead. So well did we emulate it that the rods linking our legs began to oscillate with no less force than that with which a mad dog turns on its own tail, for want of something better to bite.