Shepard’s discovery of Devlin’s concealed deed of gift turns a hidden paper into a new line of inquiry in the dispute over Crosbie Wells’s fortune. The charred document, found in Wells’s stove after his death and kept between the covers of Devlin’s Bible, records a promised payment of £2,000 from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell, with Wells as witness. Its contents seem to connect Staines to the gold in Wells’s cottage, but the absent signature makes the deed’s validity uncertain even as its discovery sharpens the questions surrounding the fortune.

A secret disclosed under pressure

The discovery begins not with Shepard searching for the document, but with Harald Nilssen disclosing what he knows during a conversation with the gaoler. Nilssen has already linked Wells’s fortune to the ransom paid in the blackmail of Alistair Lauderback: Wells, he says, took the ransom home, and that money became the fortune found in his cottage. Shepard presses him on the basis of his knowledge and his uncertain allegiance. Nilssen then reveals a second secret: a deed of gift was found in Wells’s stove, partly burned as if someone had tried to destroy it.

The chaplain discovered the paper the day after Wells’s death, when he went to collect the body. He did not tell Shepard or Dr. Gillies, and kept the document for himself. Nilssen says that it is in Devlin’s Bible, between the Old and New Testaments. His confession exposes both the paper’s existence and the chain of concealment around it: the document had survived the attempt to burn it, but its location and significance had remained hidden from the men investigating Wells’s affairs.

Nilssen’s disclosure also changes his own position in the conversation. He had intended the information to reassure Shepard of his loyalty; instead, he recognizes that revealing a secret entrusted to Devlin may make him appear disloyal. Yet speaking about the concealed document also brings him relief. The scene thus frames the deed not simply as evidence, but as an object whose custody has already created competing obligations and risks.

The Bible and the charred paper

Shepard acts on the information the following Sunday. While Devlin is preaching rote prayer to the felons in the temporary gaol-house, Shepard asks him for his Bible. Devlin has brought the battered volume with him, as he habitually does, although he has not needed to open it for that day’s sermon. Shepard’s request brings the concealed paper into the gaoler’s hands without an open accusation or a public search.

After the sermon, Devlin leaves the gaol-house and enters Shepard’s study. There he sees his Bible lying open on the desk, with the charred slip placed on top. The scene confirms that Shepard has located and read the document, while making Devlin confront the discovery directly. The paper’s hiding place, between the two parts of the Bible, had kept it out of ordinary view; once removed, it becomes a visible record that Shepard can interpret and use to guide the investigation.

What the deed appears to establish

The surviving text dates the arrangement to 11 October 1865. It states that £2,000 is to be given to Anna, formerly of New South Wales, by Emery, also formerly of New South Wales, with Crosbie Wells presiding as witness. Shepard reads the promise as pertinent to the fortune in Wells’s cottage. He reasons that the money may have originated with Staines, who intended to give exactly half of it to Anna, while Wells held it for him. Staines’s disappearance on the day of Wells’s death, and the popular belief that Wells had not been wealthy, strengthen Shepard’s hypothesis in his own eyes.

Devlin acknowledges the apparent relevance but points to a decisive defect: Staines has not signed the deed. The witness is dead, and Shepard considers Staines almost certainly dead as well. The document therefore presents a possible account of the fortune without conclusively establishing a legally effective gift. Its wording raises the prospect that Anna had a claim to a share, but the missing signature prevents Shepard from treating that claim as settled.

The deed also sits within a more complicated chain of gold transfers than Shepard knows. Devlin understands that the gold in Wells’s cottage came from four gowns sewn by Lydia Wells and bought by Anna; Ah Quee removed and retorted the gold, and Staines later stole it and concealed it in Wells’s cottage. Devlin does not disclose this full history to Shepard. The document offers a clue to the relationship between Staines and the fortune, but it does not by itself reveal how the gold passed through the gowns, the mining claim, and the cottage.

A new direction, not a resolution

Shepard’s response is to direct Devlin toward Anna rather than to claim that the paper has resolved the matter. He suggests that, if Shepard wants an answer from the person directly concerned, he should go to the Wayfarer’s Fortune and speak with her. This shifts the inquiry from the concealed document to the living recipient named in it. The deed’s value as evidence now depends not only on its damaged wording and absent signature, but also on what Anna can say about Staines and the promised money.

The discovery therefore advances the investigation while preserving its uncertainty. It connects Anna, Staines, and Wells’s fortune in a specific written arrangement; it also exposes Devlin’s concealment and Nilssen’s knowledge of it. Yet the paper cannot establish the gold’s entire history, and Shepard’s interpretation remains a hypothesis rather than a judicial finding. Its importance lies in changing the questions asked about Wells’s estate: the fortune may not have been simply Wells’s own, and the woman named as its intended recipient may be central to determining what happened to it.