By the end of the week, I began to grow a little suspicious, and sent my clerk to the office of Mr. Boyd early on Monday morning. The office was closed, and there was no Mr. Boyd there. He had gone to Sydney, and that was the last seen of Boyd in Australia. He had "buncoed" us and Denniston & Co. in the easiest sort of way. I really felt cheated, it was done so smoothly. I had not got the worth of my money, as I should have done had I been harder to deceive. There had been no sport in that.
I next heard of Boyd at Singapore; but I was to run up against him later. In '61, when I was giving a junketing trip to some people on the Union Pacific road, and a party of us were on the steamboat St. Joseph going to Omaha, a man came up to me and claimed an acquaintance. Although more than twelve years had passed, I recognized him at once as the John Boyd who had got the better of me in that little trade in Melbourne. I pretended not to know him. I suppose he assumed that the matter had passed out of my mind and that his face was no longer familiar to me. He coolly gave me his address on a card, and when I looked at it I saw "Noble & Co., Bankers, Des Moines, Iowa." I knew him by his broken nose, that would have betrayed him at the ends of the earth.
Perhaps the thing I enjoyed most in Australia was the introduction of American articles--"Yankee notions," the people there called them--into Australia, even against the prejudice of the colonists. They would fight hard against everything that was new or American, but I took a delight in overcoming their bias, and forcing them to accept our ideas. I made a calculation once of the things that I had introduced into Australia, and they amounted to something like fifty. Among these were such common things as the light wagon, the buggy, shovels, and hoes, and--wonderful to think of when one hears and reads so much in these days of the "tins" that the British army consumes--tinned, or canned, goods. These had not been heard of, and I saw at once that there was a fine chance for some profitable business. English packers could not begin to compete with us. On one cargo that I brought in from New London, Conn., we made a profit of 200 per cent. And now "Tommy Atkins" lives on the "tins" that we introduced as a method of carrying provisions from one end of the world to the other.