Emery Staines’s disappearance and opium addiction grow out of a single night with Anna Wetherell, when he tries her pipe for the first time and becomes caught in a dependency that carries him away from Hokitika for more than two months. Recounted later in court, his absence is not a clean break or a deliberate journey: it is a chain of blurred days, urgent searches for more opium, and returns to places and people he can no longer reliably remember. His eventual reappearance ties the missing time to the hidden bonanza he was seeking and to the gunshot that ended his attempt to take opium from Anna’s room.

The First Encounter with Opium

Staines’s account begins on the evening of 14 January. He met Anna at the Dust and Nugget around seven, and they went afterward to his apartment on Revell Street. He fell asleep; when he woke at about half past ten, Anna had left. Unable to understand her sudden departure, he went looking for her and reached the Gridiron Hotel. The front desk and landing were unattended, and Anna’s room was unlocked. Inside, he found her unconscious, with her pipe, resin, and lamp nearby.

Staines had never taken opium before, though he had long been curious about it. While waiting for Anna to regain consciousness, he examined the smoking apparatus and tried the pipe. He described his first experience as overwhelming and pleasurable. When the effect passed, the lamp had gone cold and the pipe was empty; Anna had disappeared. He later admitted that he thought first of obtaining the drug again, rather than of finding her. His account makes the decisive turn in the episode plain: what began as curiosity immediately displaced his concern for Anna and became an urgent need to repeat the experience.

The Disappearance into Kaniere

Before dawn, Staines left for the opium den in Kaniere Chinatown. He recalled seeing no one on the road. He estimated that he spent a fortnight there, while conceding that he could not remember the period clearly: one day blurred into the next. Ah Sook took him in, fed him, and kept track of his debts on a small chalkboard. That record of accumulating obligations gives the stay a practical shape even as Staines’s recollection loses its boundaries. He was being cared for, but also becoming indebted, and the growing need for opium narrowed his attention to securing another supply.

The court later asked how he could have been absent from Hokitika for more than two months. Staines said that he had been under the effects of opium and was astonished, on returning, to discover how much time had passed. He believed he had spent much of the interval in the den, but could not say with certainty. The duration of his absence therefore exceeds the fortnight he could tentatively identify. The gap is not filled by a continuous memory; his testimony establishes its length while preserving his uncertainty about what happened within it.

The Search for Another Supply

Staines’s clearest remembered turning point came when he woke to find Ah Sook away. Ah Sook had taken his opium with him, as he did when leaving the den. Staines became distressed, searched the premises, and grew more desperate. He then remembered Anna’s supply. The remembered source of opium redirected him from Kaniere toward Hokitika, making the return a consequence of craving rather than a recovery of purpose or clear recollection.

On a morning of heavy rain, Staines reached the Gridiron by its rear entrance and climbed the servants’ staircase. He waited until Anna went down to luncheon, then entered her room and found her resin and smoking apparatus in a drawer. A conversation began in the hallway, preventing him from leaving. When he heard Anna returning, he panicked and hid behind the drapes. Anna’s gun fired, and Staines was shot while concealed there. This discovery of him in her room provides a concrete end to one part of the disappearance: the man who had been absent for months was found in the act of seeking the drug that had drawn him back.

Reappearance, Custody, and Recovery

Staines was discovered on 20 March in the cottage that had belonged to Crosbie Wells. Asked what he was doing there, he said he believed he had been looking for his bonanza but had become confused and could not remember where he had buried it. The search for the hidden fortune thus surfaces alongside the search for opium, but his account does not make the two purposes equivalent: he remembers the aim of finding the bonanza while admitting that illness and confusion defeated it. The next morning, he was arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction, and remanded in custody.

After Staines and Anna reunited, both remained incarcerated in the Police Camp gaol. Anna’s bail was set at eight pounds, beyond her means; Staines’s was one pound and one shilling, the standard amount. Although he could have paid his own bail, he chose to stay in custody with Anna and await his summons to the Magistrate’s Court. His return therefore does not immediately restore freedom or independence: it brings him into legal proceedings and leaves him sharing confinement with the person whose opium he first tried.

Their health began to improve under the physician Dr. Gillies, who visited the gaol-house nearly every day. Staines’s shoulder wound was healing, though the joint remained stiff and he could not yet raise his arm above his head. Dr. Gillies prescribed him five drams of laudanum daily, with the dosage to decrease by one dram every fortnight until the shoulder had healed. The same treatment was prescribed for Anna, but their responses differed: Staines could not explain his newly intense thirst for the drug, whereas Anna showed little appetite for the daily dose. The prescription was intended to reduce their dependence gradually, even as Staines’s reaction showed how powerfully the drug still governed him.

Memory and the Meaning of the Absence

Staines’s testimony supplies the episode with a chronology, but not with a complete account of the missing months. He can recount the first night, the journey to Kaniere, Ah Sook’s care, the search for Anna’s resin, and the return to her room; between these remembered points, time dissolves. His astonishment at the duration of his absence is itself part of the event. The disappearance is not simply a person’s physical absence from Hokitika but a period in which his own memory cannot give him a dependable measure of his life.

Other characters register the same absence differently. Ah Sook later noted that Anna had not returned to Kaniere after the afternoon of 14 January, despite having received enough fresh resin for roughly two weeks at her usual rate of consumption. He waited for her and could not explain why she had stopped visiting; he suspected Joseph Pritchard’s involvement in Anna’s overdose, yet found the possibility that she had abandoned opium especially difficult to accept. Pritchard, meanwhile, doubted that Anna had intended suicide and wondered whether she had been drugged or was protecting someone. Their competing interpretations place Staines’s first use of the pipe inside a wider uncertainty about Anna’s overdose, without resolving that uncertainty.

The episode’s force lies in the difference between a precise date and an unmeasured stretch of time. Staines can identify 14 January as the night his first taste became a compulsion, and 20 March as the date he was found at Crosbie Wells’s former cottage, but he cannot account for the intervening months with equal precision. His absence links addiction to debts, concealment, the hidden bonanza, a shooting, and eventual custody; its central consequence is a damaged continuity between what he did and what he can remember doing.