d, "I'll bet you're thinking about the little cub which
you had for a pet after you killed the bear."

Little Jim took a swipe with his stick at the trunk of the tree, and I
noticed that his stick went ker-whack right on some initials on the
tree which said, W. J. C., which meant "William Jasper Collins," which
is my full name, only nobody ever calls me by the _middle_ name except
my pop, who calls me that only when he doesn't like me or when I'm
supposed to have done something I shouldn't. Then Little Jim said to
Poetry, just as his stick ker-whammed the initials, "Nope, something
else." Then he whirled around and started making tracks that looked
like rabbit tracks in the snow with his stick, and Tom Till spoke up
and said, "I'll bet you're thinking about the fight we had that
day...."

It was in that fight that I licked Little red-haired Tom Till, who
with his big brother Bob had belonged to the other gang.... But now
Little Tom's parents lived in our neighborhood and Tom had joined the
gang, and also went to our Sunday School, and was a swell little guy;
and as you maybe know, Bob was still a tough guy, and hated Big Jim
and all of us, and we never knew when he was going to start some new
trouble in the Sugar Creek territory....

"Well," I said, to Little Jim who was looking up into the tree again
like he was still thinking something important, "what _are_ you
thinking about?" and he said, "I was just thinking about all the
leaves, and wondering why they didn't fall off like the ones on the
maple trees do. Don't they know they're dead?"

I looked at the tree Little Jim was looking at, and it was the first
time I'd noticed that the beech tree still had nearly every one of its
leaves on it. They were very brown, even browner than some of the
maple and walnut tree leaves had been, when they'd all fallen off last
fall.

"How could they _know_ they're dead, if they _are_ dead?" Poetry said,
and just that second I heard Circus and Dragonfly coming up from the
direction of the bayou, which was down pretty close to Sugar Creek
itself.... Circus had his knife in his hand and was just finishing
trimming a small branch he had in his hand, Dragonfly had a long
fierce-looking switch in one of _his_ hands, and was swinging it
around and saying loud and fierce, "All right, Bill Collins, you can
take a licking for throwing that snowball.... Take _that_ ... and
_that_ ... and _that_...." Dragonfly was making fierce swings with