Te Rau Tauwhare finds Emery Staines alive at Crosbie Wells’s cottage after Staines has disappeared from Hokitika. The encounter changes the meaning of his absence: he is not simply missing, but sick, confused, and carrying a serious gunshot wound. His first concern is to return to Māori land and recover something he buried, while Tauwhare must decide how to help a man whose connection to hidden gold is still unclear.

The cottage and the discovery

The discovery begins with the cottage itself. Tauwhare has been watching it deteriorate: the iron roof has rusted, the mortar has turned green, and the garden Crosbie Wells planted has gone to seed. Entering through the open doorway, he sees a figure curled on the floor and initially cannot tell whether the man is asleep or dead. He moves carefully, avoiding waking him with his shadow, then recognizes the young man as Staines.

Staines’s appearance suggests a sharp fall from his former circumstances. His clothes are worn and soiled, though his coat and cravat were once fashionable; he looks severely weakened. When Tauwhare calls him by name, Staines opens his eyes and greets him. The recognition brings no immediate explanation of his disappearance. Staines is disoriented, struggling to sit up and holding his left arm awkwardly across his chest.

A search interrupted by illness

Staines tells Tauwhare that he needs to be on Māori land because he buried something near a tree and can no longer find the right place. He is grateful for Tauwhare’s arrival, but cannot give a reliable account of how long he has been alone. He guesses that he disappeared three days earlier and admits that he has lost track of the days. His urgent need to recover the buried object gives the encounter a practical purpose, but his confused account leaves its exact nature unsettled.

When Staines pulls down his shirt, Tauwhare sees a serious gunshot wound above the collarbone and recognizes that the young man needs medical attention. Staines says he never saw the danger coming and apologizes for the confusion, as well as for Tauwhare’s friend Crosbie. Feverish and unwell, he soon asks for medicine. His weakness makes the journey to Hokitika himself impossible; assistance will have to come to him.

Tauwhare’s choice to help

Tauwhare weighs the risk of leaving Staines alone against the need to summon help. He knows that reaching Hokitika, alerting Dr. Gillies, arranging a cart or trap, and returning would take at least three hours. He doubts that Staines can safely wait that long. His concern is sharpened by the memory of his sister’s final illness: in Tauwhare’s recollection, Staines’s feverish talk resembles the confused speech she showed near the end of her life.

The thought of the journey and its risks does not resolve the choice for him. Tauwhare stays with Staines long enough to say a karakia for his recovery, then gives him water and firmly tells him to remain where he is. He leaves to go to Hokitika and inform others of Staines’s location. The scene therefore ends not with Staines’s recovery, but with a decision to seek help and a promise to return soon. Tauwhare acts despite his doubts about the likelihood of treatment: he knows the local hospital is poorly equipped and regards it as a place where patients often die rather than recover.

Gold, disappearance, and unresolved clues

Staines’s intention to find what he buried connects his plight to the wider mystery of gold and disappearance. Nine months earlier, Francis Carver had cheated Alistair Lauderback out of the Godspeed and lost a shipping crate containing a trunk with approximately four thousand pounds in gold, sewn into five dresses by Lydia Wells. Separately, Crosbie Wells had secretly acquired a fortune on the Dunstan goldfields, a discovery that became known only after his death. The gold stories provide context for Tauwhare’s meeting with Staines, but they do not establish that the object Staines buried is any particular part of either fortune.

The difficulty of tracing the gold is also reflected in the dresses. Ah Quee mistook the concealed gold in Anna Wetherell’s gowns for ore connected to Dick Mannering’s dealings, and secretly removed and retorted gold from four dresses, stamping the resulting squares with the Aurora name. The remaining gold in Anna’s orange gown was later found by Anna herself after her overdose, during a period for which she had no memory. These separate movements of concealed and misidentified gold make Staines’s reference to a burial significant without making it an explanation.

At the cottage, Staines’s later, confused talk returns to looking for gold and to his former partnership with Crosbie Wells. It suggests that the buried object may belong to the same tangled history, but his fever prevents him from clarifying what he hid or where. Tauwhare’s discovery establishes the essential fact that Staines is alive and in need of care; it does not yet disclose who shot him, what he buried, or how his account fits the competing claims to the gold. The event turns a missing-person question into a rescue and a new set of questions.