noon
The cicada 's frying note fried hotter than ever . Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stood like snow mountains of a vaster world . The very snake coiled in the shade . The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious , infrequent showers , the pavements burned the feet , and the blue `` Yank '' -LRB- whom there no one dared call so by word or look -RRB- , so stoutly clad , so uncouthly misfitted , slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the trees of the public squares preempted by his tents , or with piece loaded and bayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of some confiscated office-building , from whose upper windows gray captives looked down , one of them being `` the ladies ' man . '' Not known of his keepers by that name , though as the famous Major Kincaid of Kincaid 's Battery -LRB- the latter at Mobile with new guns -RRB- , all July and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows ; looked down often and long , yet never descried one rippling fold of one gossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated `` ladies of New Orleans , '' one of whom , all that same time , was Anna Callender . No proved spy , she , no incarcerated prisoner , yet the most gravely warned , though gentlest , suspect in all the recalcitrant city . Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him .