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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,