The Police Camp gaol-house is a place of custody within a small cluster of buildings in Hokitika, but its narrative function extends beyond imprisonment. The nearby cottage where George Shepard lives becomes a hiding place for Ah Sook, while the gaol-house holds Anna Wetherell and, later, the wounded Emery Staines. Across these scenes, the camp brings fugitive concealment and official confinement together within the same closely connected space.

Setting and Layout

The Police Camp is described as a small cluster of buildings beside a track and a fenced boundary. From the stables behind the Hotel Imperial, Ah Sook surveys the surrounding allotments, lean-to kitchens, tradesmen’s doors, privies, and waste pits before settling on the camp as the last place in Hokitika where anyone would expect to find him. Within the cluster, the wooden cottage is George Shepard’s home; the gaol-house is separately identified as the place where prisoners are held.

The setting is not presented as a remote prison apart from ordinary life. The cottage has a kitchen door and a bedroom, and Margaret Shepard moves through its hall to answer a visitor. The gaol-house, meanwhile, has a corner where Anna can lie and space for a bed beside hers. These domestic and custodial details make the camp feel like a working compound where private rooms and police confinement occupy neighboring parts of the same environment.

Hiding in the Shepard Cottage

Ah Sook reaches the camp while carrying a pistol and expecting pursuit. After leaving the stables, he crosses the track to the fence and knocks at the kitchen door of George Shepard’s lean-to, watching the empty alley as he waits. The secrecy of his approach depends on the surrounding buildings: hotel glass might conceal someone watching from indoors, but the yards themselves appear empty. His choice is a calculated reversal—he seeks safety in the place most closely associated with the authority likely to hunt him.

The cottage does in fact conceal him. In a later scene, Sook Yongsheng lies beneath George Shepard’s bed, listening to the Wesleyan chapel bells ring half past five. Margaret Shepard’s footsteps, the lifted latch, and the opening door mark the outside world at the threshold while he remains hidden below. The room that belongs to the police official’s household thus becomes temporary cover for a fugitive, making the camp’s protective and coercive functions difficult to separate.

Confinement and Care

The gaol-house also holds Anna Wetherell after her arrest. Cowell Devlin makes room for her in a corner and secures her with manacles, though he does so regretfully and as loosely as he can. He asks Margaret Shepard to bring a blanket for Anna’s head, an instruction she obeys silently. Anna lies peacefully in her black mourning gown, markedly thin; the scene contrasts her present stillness with the fever and restless sleep Devlin recalls from her earlier attempt on her life.

Emery Staines is brought to the gaol-house after the bullet is removed from his shoulder and his wound is stitched. His clothes have been cut away and replaced with donated garments, but his immediate concern is not where he will recover: when he learns that he may be installed at the Criterion Hotel, he insists on remaining near Anna. The physician agrees to place him in a bed beside hers, and Staines accepts a manacle without protest. Before sleeping, he reaches out to touch Anna’s cheek; later, the two lie facing one another, their bodies curled inward, with Anna’s outstretched hand reaching toward him.

Narrative Significance

The camp gathers sharply different forms of vulnerability into a confined setting. Ah Sook hides from pursuit beneath the bed of a police official, while Anna and Emery are held under guard in the neighboring gaol-house. Yet the scenes do not reduce the place to a simple opposition between refuge and prison: the authorities’ custody includes gestures of care, such as Devlin’s loose manacling and the blanket, while the Shepard home itself shelters someone the law would seek.

The physical nearness of cottage and gaol-house also places domestic intimacy beside institutional control. Margaret’s ordinary passage to the door, Anna’s enforced confinement, and Emery’s determination to stay beside her all occur within the Police Camp’s compact world. The location’s significance lies in this overlap: it is at once a site of pursuit, concealment, detention, and human attachment.