On leaving the service--as he was over head and ears in debt to the Jew sharks, who in those days battened on the follies of young officers--troth! they do it still, when not more lucratively employed in the art of bogus company promoting, and other congenial pursuits--his people thought a _tour du monde_ would be a salutary exercise for him, and that if he could pick out some salubrious spot about half-way round, and make a permanent camp there, why, so much the better for them. So Mad Conway landed in South Africa some time in the fifties. Now what he originally intended to do there I don't know, and I don't think he knew himself; but he certainly wandered all over the country, taking a hand wherever the chance occurred in any Kafir fighting that might be going on, and putting in his spare time big-game hunting and exploring.
In both these congenial occupations he quickly gained the reputation of being a man utterly devoid of fear, while the wild and fantastic pranks he would play when he happened to be in a town made him an object of wonder and astonishment to both the phlegmatic Boers and the lazy Portuguese, some of them even causing his own more up-to-date and reckless countrymen to open their eyes. During this period of his existence he accompanied two successive expeditions that were organised for the purpose of searching the lower reaches and delta of the Zambesi for a gold-laden dhow that the Portuguese had sunk in the early part of the century, so as to prevent her capture by an English cruiser. On both these occasions Conway was the only European who survived the attacks of fever and wild beasts, and although, on the second trip, they actually located the dhow, still, before they could clear the drifted sand from off her his last surviving mate died. Conway always declared that, notwithstanding the awful hardships he had undergone, he would have stuck to the job, lone handed, and would have scooped the jack pot himself, but the dop (common Boer-made peach-brandy) cask gave out, and as that and quinine were his sole diet, he had to chuck the contract before he could touch the geldt. Darned bad luck, he called it, especially as the long war waged by the Zambesi natives against the Portuguese, at that time breaking out, prevented him from having another try for the plunder. Reaching Delagoa Bay, thanks to the kindness of the officers of one of H.M. cruisers, he wandered up to the Transvaal, and took a turn on the early goldfields. Doing no good, he drifted away to the Free State, where, as aforementioned, he earned the name of Vrei Stadt Conway by his feats of reckless daring. Let me recount one of them.