Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells's trust and shared gold secret

Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells’s trust is built less through a long partnership than through a single consequential confidence: Staines brings Wells news of Anna Wetherell’s loss, discloses a buried fortune, and proposes setting aside a share for her. Their relationship joins personal loyalty to the novel’s tangled gold histories. Wells receives Staines’s news in silence and helps put his promise into documentary form, but Staines departs without signing. The unsigned deed and the uncertain movement of the gold leave their connection both intimate and unresolved.

A Relationship Formed Through Anna

Staines and Wells are connected by Anna Wetherell before their exchange about money. On the night of 11 October, Staines learns from Benjamin Löwenthal that Anna has been assaulted. He goes directly to the Arahura Valley to tell Wells, explaining later that Wells was the father of the child Anna was carrying and therefore had a right to know that the child had died. The journey makes Staines a messenger between two people whose relationship to Anna is different, but whose concern for her converges at a moment of crisis.

Wells’s response is restrained. Staines recalls that he was very quiet and said little; the two shared a drink and sat together for a while, and Staines stayed late. The account offers no grand declaration of friendship or explicit reconciliation. Instead, their closeness appears in the fact that Staines takes painful news to Wells and remains with him after delivering it. Wells, in turn, receives the news without turning the conversation into an argument or a demand. Their trust is expressed through presence, listening, and what Staines chooses to disclose next.

The Buried Fortune and the Proposed Gift

During that visit, Staines tells Wells about a fortune he has buried near the cottage. He says that if Anna survives the night, he intends to give her Carver’s share. The proposal connects the private encounter to the gold conflict surrounding Francis Carver, but it also gives the money a personal purpose: Staines presents it as a means of helping Anna after the assault, rather than merely as a stake in a mining or commercial dispute.

The fortune’s path is complicated by the fact that gold from different sources becomes entangled in the story. Earlier, a trunk containing approximately four thousand pounds in gold had been concealed in the linings of five dresses prepared by Lydia Wells. After the trunk was lost, Anna wore the dresses without, as far as anyone could establish, understanding their full contents. Ah Quee later removed gold from four of them, retorted it into squares, and stamped it with the name of the Aurora mine. The remaining portion, sewn into Anna’s orange dress, was found by Anna after her collapse and arrest. This hidden dress-gold is distinct from the fortune Staines says he buried near Wells’s cottage; their juxtaposition helps explain why the characters’ accounts of ownership and movement are so difficult to disentangle.

At Staines’s later examination, Lawrence Broham asks how the fortune came to be found in Wells’s cottage. Staines says he does not know for certain and supposes that Wells dug it up and took it for himself. This is Staines’s conjecture, not a confirmed account of what Wells did. It nevertheless shows that, even after entrusting Wells with the location of the buried wealth, Staines cannot supply a settled explanation for its subsequent presence in the cottage.

The Deed That Remained Unsigned

Wells drew up a document recording Staines’s proposed gift to Anna, but Staines did not sign it. Asked why, he cannot recall precisely: he had been drinking, it was late, and the conversation may have turned elsewhere; alternatively, he may have intended to sign and simply forgotten. The document therefore preserves evidence of intention without completing the formal act that would have made the gift legally effective. Their confidence in each other is real, but it does not eliminate the consequences of delay and omission.

The episode also defines the difference between a spoken promise and a completed transfer. Staines speaks of giving Anna Carver’s share and allows Wells to put the intention into writing, yet leaves the valley in the early morning without signing. The record of the promise survives through Staines’s later testimony, while its legal force remains uncertain. The relationship is thus marked by trust and incompletion at once: Wells is trusted with both the child’s death and the secret of the buried fortune, but the practical arrangement they begin is left unfinished.

Trust, Gold, and Uncertainty

The larger story keeps the two men’s shared secret within a chain of disputed fortunes. Crosbie Wells had himself made a substantial strike at Dunstan years earlier and kept his wealth concealed. After his death, gold hidden throughout his cottage was discovered, purified, and valued at a little over four thousand pounds; the estate proceeds were held in escrow amid Lydia Wells’s challenge to Edgar Clinch’s purchase. Separately, Ah Quee’s Aurora-stamped gold disappeared from the camp vault, and Staines was considered a possible thief, although his motive remained unclear. These overlapping fortunes make the gold near Wells’s cottage more than a simple possession: its origin, route, and rightful owner all matter.

Staines and Wells do not resolve those questions together. Their strongest recorded act of mutual confidence is the exchange in the valley: Staines entrusts Wells with news about Anna and knowledge of buried wealth, while Wells drafts a deed that could direct part of it to her. In retrospect, that meeting binds grief, loyalty, and money into one unfinished transaction. The gold links their lives, but the absent signature and Staines’s uncertainty about what Wells later did ensure that their shared secret remains only partly understood.