Landor is attacked outside Benny Havens' tavern when a customary warning of a military raid gives way to a nighttime pursuit. He catches sight of a fleeing figure near a horse, but a second assailant intervenes and knocks him unconscious. The encounter ends in failure as a physical chase, yet Landor recovers a white priest’s collar from the struggle—a concrete clue that complicates the apparent escape and resonates with his investigation of religious ritual.

Background and the tavern drill

The incident begins inside Benny Havens' tavern, where a visit from one of Sylvanus Thayer’s officers is a familiar weekly occurrence. On a raid night, the person nearest the door gives the alarm; cadets who have chosen to run are hurried out and directed up the riverbank. The others stay behind, ready to feign ignorance if the officer asks whether cadets were present. The procedure is orderly and practiced, an informal arrangement shaped around evading the academy’s rules rather than confronting the officer.

On this night, Patsy throws Edgar Allan Poe his cloak and helps him up, while Benny Havens pulls him away from the fireplace and toward the door; Mrs. Havens gives him a final push outside. The rapid response initially makes the episode look like another familiar escape. But the expected officer does not come through the door. Benny eventually opens it himself, and the gathering waits without knowing whether Poe has been stopped on the way to the river.

Asher Lippard, who sounded the alarm, insists that he recognized the insignia bar on an officer’s shoulder by lantern light. When Landor asks whether he saw anything else, Asher’s confidence falters: he had seen the bar, but could offer no further identifying detail. The distinction matters. The alarm has set the drill in motion, but the group has little reliable knowledge of who, if anyone, is outside. A routine signal has created both a distraction and an uncertain trail.

The pursuit and attack

A fine icy rain falls outside, the same weather that had accompanied Randolph Ballinger’s murder. Landor goes up the steps toward the main road and hears movement that he takes to be a person running away. His response comes from his years as a constable: rather than remain at the tavern or wait for a clearer account, he follows. In the darkness, he cannot see the figure plainly and has to use the sound of boots to track it.

A horse nearby changes the stakes. Landor reasons that once the fugitive mounts, pursuit will become much harder, so he waits for the vulnerable moment of mounting before making his move. His eyes have adjusted enough for him to distinguish the horse and a second figure bracing against the saddle. He lunges at the most visible feature, a white stripe, and holds on as the two tumble down a steep part of the road.

The fall ends the immediate struggle but not in Landor’s favor. He loses consciousness, and when he comes to, the horse is already galloping north. At first he understands the failure as a mistake in his own calculation: he had assumed he was dealing with one fugitive. The encounter has in fact involved another person, hidden from his view and able to strike him while he grappled with the rider. The escape is therefore not simply the result of the horse or the darkness; Landor has been outnumbered.

The recovered clue

After staggering back to the tavern, Landor has his head attended to by Mrs. Havens and receives the sympathy of the people inside. Only later does he notice what the struggle has left wrapped around his coat sleeve: a band of stiff white cloth, dirtied by the encounter. It is the white collar of a priest, the only object he has taken from the scene. The clue does not establish the identity of either assailant, but it gives material form to what would otherwise have remained an unexplained escape and assault.

The collar is especially suggestive in the context of Landor and Poe’s inquiry. At the icehouse, Landor had proposed treating Leroy Fry’s heart removal as an act with religious dimensions and looking for traces of a ceremony in the objects or impressions left behind. His method depends on remnants: even when the objects of a rite are removed, their marks may persist. Here, too, a person vanishes into darkness while a fragment of clothing remains. The collar cannot by itself prove a connection to the icehouse or to Fry’s death, but its religious association gives the pursuit an investigative consequence beyond Landor’s personal defeat.

Consequences and narrative significance

The attack reverses the tavern episode’s ordinary logic. The weekly raid custom is designed to help cadets evade authority, and the group initially responds by performing its familiar roles. Yet the uncertain sighting, the absent officer, and the figure outside shift the night from a controlled drill into a pursuit with real danger. Landor’s constable’s instinct sends him away from the company and into a situation where darkness limits what he can identify and a second assailant can act unseen.

The narrative makes the outcome double-edged: Landor fails to catch the rider, but the assailants do not leave him empty-handed. The collar is a modest, ambiguous object rather than a solved identity, and its uncertainty is precisely what keeps the event open to further investigation. The assault also connects the investigation’s recurring concerns—concealment, religious signs, and evidence left behind—to Landor’s own exposure to violence. The attack does not resolve who pursued him or why; it converts an inconclusive chase into a new question for the case.

The incident is narrated by Landor as part of the main action. His account emphasizes the limits of what he could see and know at each stage: a reported insignia, boots on the road, a horse, a white stripe, and finally the collar. The sequence narrows attention from an unreliable alarm to a single recovered object. What first seems like another routine escape from a raid becomes a serious assault, and what seems like total failure yields the one clue that survives the darkness.