The shooting of Emery Staines in the Gridiron

The shooting of Emery Staines in the Gridiron Hotel is reconstructed through testimony that seems at first to rule out the very wound Staines says he received. Anna Wetherell recalls a pistol misfiring in her room, followed by a test shot into her pillow by Aubert Gascoigne; Staines later places himself, unseen, behind the room’s drapes and says he took a bullet from that same gun. The event’s significance lies in the gap between these accounts: a concealed presence and a missing bullet turn an everyday mishap into a question of evidence, memory, and trust.

The afternoon at the Gridiron

On the afternoon of January 27, Anna was in her room talking with Joseph Pritchard. She habitually carried her pistol in the front of her dress. When Gascoigne entered suddenly, she was startled and drew it; the weapon misfired. The three could not determine what had gone wrong. Thinking the pistol might be broken, Gascoigne had Anna reload it and fired a second shot into her pillow to test it. He returned the weapon, and Anna put it in a drawer. She told the court that this was the last time she touched it.

The sequence appeared to account for two shots, but not for a bullet wound to a person. Under cross-examination, Pritchard agreed that the first bullet had vanished at the misfire and that Gascoigne had fired the second into the pillow as an experiment. His evidence supported Anna’s account while sharpening the unresolved question: if neither reported shot struck Staines, how did he come to be hit by Anna’s gun?

Why Pritchard was there

Pritchard’s presence had a purpose beyond the ordinary visit Anna’s account might suggest. Walter Moody asked why he had sought an audience with her that afternoon. Pritchard said he suspected another story behind Anna’s attempted suicide and wanted to examine her supply of opium; he thought it might have been poisoned or adulterated. His concern therefore brought him into the room at the very time the pistol was drawn and tested. It also places the shooting within a wider chain of uncertainty surrounding Anna’s opium and her earlier collapse, without establishing that her supply had in fact been tampered with.

At a later court hearing, the judge separated the charges then being considered from the question of Ah Sook’s acquittal. He noted that Anna’s association with Ah Sook mattered personally to the plaintiff, but said the new developments did not warrant reopening that matter. The proceedings were focused on Anna, not on the plaintiff’s motives. Moody caught Anna’s eye and gave her a small smile, which she returned; the account marks this exchange as a victory. In that legal setting, testimony about the January shooting became part of a case whose boundaries the court was actively defining.

Staines behind the drapes

Staines supplied the concealed part of the afternoon. He said he had awakened to find Ah Sook gone, with his opium gone too. Upset and desperate, he searched for it, then remembered Anna’s supply. He set out for Hokitika in heavy rain, reached the Gridiron without meeting anyone he knew, entered by the rear door, and climbed the servants’ staircase. When Anna went down to luncheon, he slipped into her room and found the resin and her apparatus in a drawer.

A conversation began in the hallway, leaving Staines unable to get out. When Anna returned, he panicked and hid behind the drapes. He estimated that he remained there from about noon until about three, though he made clear that the hours were only an estimate. From that hiding place, he said, he took the bullet from Anna’s gun. His testimony reveals the presence missing from Anna’s account, but does not reconcile the shooting with her recollection that Gascoigne’s test shot went into the pillow and that she thereafter put the pistol away.

The testimony of trust

Broham challenged the plausibility of Staines remaining silent after being shot at close range, without crying out or making a sound that might have alerted the three witnesses. Staines confirmed that he had kept quiet. Asked why, he answered that he trusted Anna. The courtroom fell still, and Broham pressed him on whether silence was merely possible rather than probable; Staines did not change his answer.

That declaration does not solve the physical sequence, but it changes the emotional meaning of the concealed wound. Staines’s account joins the shooting to his secret return for opium, his desperate search, and his decision to remain hidden even after being struck. Anna’s account, meanwhile, presents her as unaware of anyone behind the drapes and ends with the pistol in its drawer. The courtroom holds both versions together without erasing their contradiction. The shot is thus not only an injury but a point where the hidden and the witnessed, the remembered and the legally asserted, fail to align.