Rushing out to the point above the reef, we watched the conflict between canoe and sea. When the man reached the gas boat, the screams of the boy stopped. With great risk they loaded the canoe till she began to take water. The boy bailed furiously. The long dogged pull of the man's oars challenged death inch by inch, wave by wave.
It had taken nine years from the evening that Truman first showed up with a pie plate at her mother's door, but his dogged perseverance eventually won him the hand of his boyhood Sunday school crush.