Nevertheless, I had not dreamed: a strange runner was in front of the locomotive, but he was not riding a straight-framed, balloon-tired machine! But he was not wearing elastic-sided boots! But his bicycle was not creaking, except in my buzzing eardrums! But he had not broken his chain, since his bicycle was a machine without a chain! The ends of a loose, black strap floated behind him and caressed the front of the locomotive! This was what I had taken for a mudguard, and for the tails of a frock coat! The swelling of his extensor muscles had torn his shorts over his thighs! His bicycle was a racing model the like of which I had never seen, with microscopic tires and a development greater than that of our machine; he was pedaling with the greatest of ease and, indeed, as if his pedals were disconnected. The man was in front of us: I saw the back of his neck, wild with long hair; the cord of his pince-nez – or a black lock of hair – was pushed right back onto his shoulders by the breeze caused by the race. The muscles of his calves were palpitating like two alabaster hearts.

There was a movement on the platform of the locomotive, as though some momentous event were about to take place. Arthur Gough gently pushed back Miss Elson, who was leaning forward to watch, with love, it seemed, the unknown racer. The engineer seemed to be conferring with Mr. Elson in sharp tones, apparently trying to exact some exorbitant concession from him. The old man’s beseeching voice reached me:

“You’re not going to give it to the locomotive to drink? It would hurt it! It’s not a human creature! You’re not going to kill this animal!”

After a few rapid and unintelligible phrases:

“Then let me make the sacrifice myself! Let me only be separated from it at the last instant!”

The white-bearded chemist raised a phial in his hands with infinite precaution. It contained, I have since learned, an admirable rum that could have been his ancestor, and that he had been saving to drink alone; he poured this ultimate fuel into the locomotive’s boiler. . . The alcohol was no doubt too admirable: the machine went psshhhh. . . and went out.

So it was that the Perpetual Motion Food’s five-man cycle won the Ten-Thousand-Mile Race; but neither Corporal Gilbey nor Sammy White nor George Webb nor Bob Rumble nor, I think, Jewey Jacobs in the other world nor I, Ted Oxborrow, who sign this report for all of them, will ever be able to console ourselves for finding, when we arrived at the finish post – where no one was waiting for us, since no one had foreseen so prompt an arrival – this post crowned with red roses, the same haunting red roses that had blazed the trail during the entire race. . .

No one has been able to tell us what became of the fantastic racer.