Wells was a station hand, not a hardened bushranger, and his hold-up went sideways almost at once. As he moved to leave the bank, William Murphy, a storekeeper from next door, tried to grab him; in the struggle Murphy was shot in the shoulder - by most accounts accidentally. The alarm went up. Wells bolted for his horse, only for the bridle to break in his hands, and he was left running through the streets with townspeople in pursuit. Two men carrying unloaded guns gave chase until Wells rounded on them, threatening to shoot if they came closer, and vanished into the bush. It was a clumsy, panicked crime - and it would cost a man his life and leave a wounded one behind.

The hiding place that betrayed him is a mature cypress pine, Callitris cupressiformis, an Australian native well suited to dry, sandy ground and found across the eastern and southern states. By 1979 the tree stood about fifteen metres tall on its low ridge near the corner of Bedford Street, on the outskirts of town. Today a simple fence of metal posts and wire rings the trunk, marking it out from the scrub around it. There is nothing grand about it - no plaque-worthy architecture, no sweeping view - just a working outback tree that happened to shelter a fugitive for a few desperate hours and so earned itself a name and a legend.

Wells was tried at Toowoomba for armed robbery with wounding, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Despite public debate in the Queensland press about whether the penalty fit the crime - Murphy had survived, after all - the sentence stood. Wells was executed on 22 March 1880 and buried in Brisbane's Toowong Cemetery. His case did not end there. One of those troubled by it, Arthur Rutledge, later became Queensland's Attorney-General, and during his term he moved to strike armed robbery from the colony's list of capital offences. Wells is remembered as the last man hanged in Queensland for armed robbery with wounding - not the last execution in the colony, but the last for that particular crime, his death a turning point others would not have to share.

Heritage-listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992, the Robbers Tree is valued less for botany than for memory. It survives because a community decided the story was worth keeping: a single afternoon in 1880 when a small Warrego River town caught its own would-be robber, and a quirk of local history hardened into legend. For travellers passing through Cunnamulla on the long road between Bourke and Charleville, the tree is a reason to stop - a chance to stand where a barking dog once decided a man's fate, and to consider how thin the line ran between a botched robbery and a change in the law.