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we were all in on it Probably he did believe it. 

He went into Andy's cell and looked around. It was just as Andy had left it, the sheets of 

his bunk turned back but without looking slept-in. Rocks on the windowsill... but not all 

of them. The ones he liked best he took with him. 

'Rocks,' Norton hissed, and swept them off the window-ledge with a clatter. Gonyar, 

already four hours overtime, winced but said nothing. 

Norton's eyes fell on the Linda Ronstadt poster. Linda was looking back over her 

shoulder, her hands tucked into the back pockets of a very tight pair of fawn-coloured 

slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep California tan. It must have offended 

the hell out of Norton's Baptist sensibilities, that poster. Watching him glare at it, I 

remembered what Andy had once said about feeling he could almost step through the 

picture and be with the girl. 

In a very real way, that was exactly what he did - as Norton was only seconds from 

discovering. 

'Wretched thing!' he grunted, and ripped the poster from the wall with a single swipe of 

his hand. 

And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it. Gonyar wouldn't go in. 

Norton ordered him - God, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich Gonyar to go in 

there all over the prison - and Gonyar just refused him, point-blank. 

'I'll have your job for this!' Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a woman having a 

hot-flush. He had utterly blown his cool. His neck had turned a rich, dark red, and two 

veins stood out, throbbing, on his forehead. 'You can count on it, you ... you Frenchman! 

I'll have your job and I'll see to it that you never get another one in any prison system in 

New England!' 

Gonyar silently held out his service pistol to Norton, butt first. He'd had enough. He was 

four hours overtime, going on five, and he'd just had enough. It was as if Andy's 

defection from our happy little family had driven Norton right over the edge of some 

private irrationality that had been there for a long time ... certainly he was crazy that 

night. 

I don't know what that private irrationality might have been, of course. But I do know 

that there were twenty-eight cons listening to Norton's little dust-up with Rich Gonyar 

that evening as the last of the light faded from a dull late winter sky, all of us hard-timers 

and long-line riders who had seen the administrators come and go, the hard-asses and the' 

candy-asses alike, and we all knew that Warden Samuel Norton had just passed what the 

engineers like to call 'the breaking strain'. 

And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could heard Andy Dufresne 

laughing. 

Norton finally got a skinny drink, of water on the night shift to go into that hole that had 

been behind Andy's poster of Linda Ronstadt. The skinny guard's name was Rory 

Tremont, and he was not exactly a ball of fire in the brains department. Maybe he thought 

he was going to win a Bronze Star or something. As it turned out, it was fortunate that 

Norton got someone of Andy's approximate height and build to go in there; if they had 

sent a big-assed fellow - as most prison guards seem to be - the guy would have stuck in