I often relied entirely on him for information. I put my hat, with him on it, on the branch of a tree or on top of a cane and went tranquilly to sleep near my horse browsing in the grass. When I awoke I called:
“Fiam, who is winning?”
“If you are awake,” he answered, “we will go and send a telegram to your journal.”
Then I would put him in the hat band, mount my horse and gallop away to the nearest military telegraph station.
We had many curious expressions. He could never understand firearms. The discharge of muskets he called little thunder, and that of cannon big thunder. He thought that men really hurled thunderbolts. When I tried to explain to him about guns and cannon he would respond:
“All right! All right! But the fact is that these machines which work with that thing you call powder are nothing but factories of thunderbolts of various sizes, and we can prove it, because we see and hear both the lightning and the thunder.”
“WHO IS WINNING?”
Another of his ideas was that the telegraph was nothing but a Haji. For him it was a live Haji in a copper wire that carried the messages. He spoke of it as “my brother of the wire.”