Staines is found and reunited with Anna is the rescue and recognition of Emery Staines after his disappearance: Te Rau Tauwhare discovers him at Crosbie Wells’s cottage, Joseph Pritchard brings him back to Hokitika with a bullet wound in his shoulder, and the gravely ill young man insists on staying beside Anna. The episode converts absence into physical presence, but not into immediate recovery. Staines returns feverish, confused, and barely able to speak; what he can express most urgently is that he wants Anna.

Discovery and condition

Pritchard first finds Staines awake only in fits, his eyes fluttering open before focusing on the chemist crouched over him. When Pritchard draws back his collar, the blackened wound beneath it is exposed. Staines does not resist the examination; instead, he searches Pritchard’s face and asks whether he managed to scrape up a piece of something. Pritchard’s puzzled response makes clear that Staines’s words are not yet a reliable account of events.

Staines’s sense of time is equally uncertain. He speaks of three days and midnight, then says that he had fancied a walk. Pritchard judges him incoherent, while Tauwhare asks directly whether he will die. Pritchard feels his cheek and forehead and observes that Staines does not look too thin. Someone has apparently been feeding him, or he has scavenged for himself; yet the chemist emphasizes the extremity of his condition by noting that eight weeks have passed and that something more than prayers has kept him alive. His survival is therefore revealed as precarious, not as evidence that the danger has passed.

The return to Hokitika

Pritchard decides that Staines must be taken back to Hokitika so that Dr. Gillies can remove the bullet from his shoulder. He promises medicine to ease the pain and sets about getting the wounded man onto the trap. Staines, feverish and sweating, drifts between fragments: he praises Māori guides, says Anna’s name, and refers to an aria and a vow. These remarks do not form a coherent explanation of his disappearance. They instead register how little of his condition can be recovered through speech at this point.

Pritchard and Tauwhare carry him from the cottage and arrange him on the trap’s seat, one man on either side to keep him from falling forward. Tauwhare tucks his woollen coat around Staines’s legs. Pritchard then gives him Laudanum from a jar, supporting the back of his neck and encouraging him to swallow until he settles back. The transport is a joint act of practical care: Pritchard supplies medical attention and the means to get him to town, while Tauwhare helps bear and steady his body. Staines is not brought back under his own power, and the journey does not restore his clarity; it makes further treatment possible.

Anna and the gaol-house

At the gaol-house, Devlin and Gascoigne come outside when Pritchard announces that he has arrived with Staines. Devlin is astonished by the boy’s appearance and youth: the missing man he had imagined is, in front of him, a pale, sunken-eyed figure whom he judges barely older than a child. Pritchard explains that Tauwhare found him hiding in Crosbie’s cottage and asks for help getting him down from the trap.

The question of where to take Staines immediately becomes a question of whether he will be separated from Anna. When Pritchard asks if he knows where he is, Staines mumbles her name and asks where she is. Devlin tells him she is inside. Staines opens his eyes and says, suddenly lucid, that he wants to see her. Pritchard doubts the coherence of the request, but Gascoigne considers him clear enough; Devlin agrees to bring him in, at least until the doctor arrives. The scene briefly places medical judgment, custodial procedure, and Staines’s expressed wish in tension. The gaol-house is not his intended destination for treatment, but it is where Anna is, and that fact determines his immediate choice.

After the bullet is removed and the wound stitched, Staines’s filthy clothes are cut away and his face and hair washed. He is given moleskin trousers and a loose twill shirt from Tiegreen’s Hardware, on the promise of payment the following day. As the physician intends to install him at the Criterion Hotel opposite the Police Camp, Staines wakes enough to object: he will not leave Anna or go anywhere she cannot go. His insistence is strong enough that the physician relents. A bed is made for him in the gaol-house beside Anna, and he accepts being manacled like the others without protest. Once settled, he reaches out to touch her cheek before falling asleep.

Recognition and significance

The reunion is completed less by conversation than by the arrangement of their bodies. Staines does not wake again during the night. He lies on his left hip, Anna on her right, both with their knees drawn toward their chests; his injured shoulder is protected by the hand tucked beneath it, while Anna rests one hand beneath her cheek. Her other arm reaches outward, palm turned down. Devlin finds them facing one another, their breathing in tandem, and recognizes what their earlier speech and confusion had not established plainly for him: they are lovers.

That recognition gives the rescue its emotional consequence without turning it into a cure. Staines has been recovered from the cottage and treated, but remains wounded, dependent on others, and asleep; Anna is still a prisoner in the same gaol-house. Their closeness is shown through his refusal to be moved away from her and through the quiet, mirrored posture Devlin witnesses, not through a declaration from either of them. The scene thus reunites the separated pair while keeping their vulnerability in view. Staines’s return changes the meaning of Anna’s waiting, and the simple fact of their shared bed allows Devlin—and the reader—to understand the bond that his delirious words could not explain.