Tauwhare’s discovery of Emery Staines

Te Rau Tauwhare’s discovery of Emery Staines at Crosbie Wells’s cottage breaks the silence surrounding Staines’s disappearance: the missing prospector is alive, but badly ill and unable to explain himself clearly. Te Rau Tauwhare responds not as an investigator seeking a confession, but as a witness faced with an immediate choice about whether and how to help.

Background and Discovery

By the time Te Rau Tauwhare reaches the cottage, it has become a sign of its absent owner’s decline. The iron roof has rusted, the mortar has changed colour, and the garden Crosbie Wells once tended has gone to seed. Inside, Te Rau Tauwhare notices a figure curled on the floor. He approaches carefully, first confirming that the man is breathing, then recognizing the young prospector as Emery Staines.

Staines’s return does not resolve his disappearance. His clothes are worn and soiled, and his account of how long he has been gone is uncertain: he thinks it may have been three days, but says he has lost track of time. When he asks Te Rau Tauwhare to look at his shoulder, the condition of the wound makes clear that he needs medical care. Te Rau Tauwhare recognizes it as a serious gunshot wound, with signs of fever and infection. The discovery therefore changes the immediate question from where Staines has gone to whether he can survive long enough to be taken for help.

Staines’s confused remarks also reconnect his condition to the gold at the heart of the surrounding mystery. He says he has been looking for his bonanza, although he knows it lies on Māori land and admits he has become lost. His references to dividing a find between partners offer fragments, not an orderly explanation of what happened. Against the earlier uncertainty over the missing gold and Staines’s own disappearance, these words deepen the mystery even as they establish that he is still preoccupied with the fortune.

Care and a Difficult Choice

Te Rau Tauwhare must decide whether to leave for Hokitika to seek medical help or stay with Staines. He knows that reaching Dr. Gillies and arranging transport would take at least three hours, and doubts the local hospital can offer effective care. But leaving risks Staines dying alone before help returns. Remembering his sister’s final illness, he recognizes the danger in Staines’s feverish, disordered speech and chooses not to treat the decision as a simple matter of fetching a doctor.

Te Rau Tauwhare says a karakia for Staines’s recovery, then gives him water from his flask and drapes his own coat over the sick man’s legs. He tells Staines he will go to Hokitika and inform others of his location. The gestures offer immediate care without pretending that the danger has passed: Staines remains too ill to make sense of his circumstances, while Te Rau Tauwhare leaves to bring help.

The Unresolved Gold Trail

Staines’s reappearance does not settle the question of the fortune moving through the goldfields. Months earlier, a trunk containing about four thousand pounds in gold had been lost after Francis Carver used it to force Alistair Lauderback to surrender the Godspeed. The gold had been sewn into five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. The dresses later became an unwitting hiding place: Ah Quee removed the gold from four of them, retorted it into bars, and stamped the bars with the Aurora name so the proceeds could be credited to the claim Staines had purchased.

The missing bars remain an important uncertainty around Staines’s return. They were stolen from the camp-station vault, and Staines was considered a possible thief, although his reason for taking gold from his own indentured worker was unclear. He had not banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora as required, a failure that left the mine’s recorded prospects misleading. Meanwhile, the fifth dress still held gold: Anna Wetherell found it after waking in gaol with no memory of the preceding twelve hours and hid it with Aubert Gascoigne. Staines’s presence at Crosbie Wells’s cottage thus restores a missing person to the story without resolving how the dispersed fortune, the Aurora claim, and the cottage are connected.

Land, Care, and the Unfinished Search

Staines’s disorientation also gives his search for the bonanza a boundary he recognizes but cannot reliably navigate: he knows the gold lies on Māori land, yet says he can find no fence or other marker to distinguish it. The scene leaves that search unresolved. At the cottage, the urgent task is not to follow him toward the gold but to keep him alive; his return restores a witness to the mystery while offering no dependable account of what happened.