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before. It had been broken into. Beside the jagged hole in the pipe, Tremont found Andy's
rock-hammer.
Andy had gotten free, but it hadn't been easy.
The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended; it had a two-foot
bore. Rory Tremont didn't go in, and so far as I know, no one else did, either. It must
have been damn near unspeakable. A rat jumped out of the pipe as Tremont was
examining the hole and the rock-hammer, and he swore later that it was nearly as big as a
cocker spaniel pup. He went back up the crawlspace to Andy's cell like a monkey on a
stick.
Andy had gone into that pipe. Maybe he knew that it emptied into a stream five hundred
yards beyond the prison on the marshy western side. I think he did. The prison blueprints
were around, and Andy would have found a way to look at them. He was a methodical
cuss. He would have
known or found out that the sewerpipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in
Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it
was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us
over to the new waste-treatment plant, too.
Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of a mile. He crawled that
distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a
couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can't imagine or
don't want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for
him the way such animals sometimes will when they've had a chance to grow bold in the
dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he
probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined.
If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But
he did it
At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the
sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his
prison uniform - that was a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile
radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man
in the moonlight There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of
the sewerpipe and he disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man,
it gives me great pleasure to report The spring was gone from his step. On his last day he
shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for his
codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the
unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending
services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne
ever could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it,