He had been apologizing for his slowness over an errand something about leaves, it had been the leaves of those aspens in the yard he had told his father that they had been little green flames he had stopped to look at them. "You damn fool!" Sylvester had said as he struck. "You damn fool!" Once, when a stranger asked five-year-old Dickie his name, he had answered innocently "Dickie-damn-fool!"