If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it's just that you get time to think. Andy had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he got out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the warden told him, would be "counter-productive". That's another of those phrases you have to master before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field.

Patiently, Andy renewed his request. And renewed it. And renewed it. He had changed, had Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us, there were lines in his face and sprigs of grey showing in his hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile that always seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, and you get to know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served, the months, the weeks, the days.

He renewed his request, and renewed i. t He was patient. He had nothing but time. It got to be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on poverty and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool, a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in British music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston Red Sox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of '67, were languishing in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on out in a larger world where people walked free.

"If it's the money, you don't have to worry," Andy told Norton in a low voice. "Do you think I'd talk that up? I'd be cutting my own throat I'd be just as indictable as --"

"That's enough," Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone. He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.

"Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I'll retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, ufresne. I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that's your affair. Don't make it mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?"

"But-"

Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andy himself some seven years later.

"Don't you ever mention money to me again," Norton said. "Not in this office, not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and paint-locker again. Do you understand?"

"I was trying to set your mind at ease, that's all."

"I think we can put it together," Andy said. "With Tommy Williams and with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we can put it together."

"What in God's name for?"

"Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility."

"What?"

"He's been transferred."

At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum -security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and that's hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a furlough programme… which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic.

"Transferred where?"

"Cashman."

"Yes," Andy said. "But I'll be hiring a lawyer, you know."

"As a favour to you," Norton said calmly, "I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP -- provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programmes to put criminals out on the streets. He's since disappeared."

"But why?" Andy said. "Why would --"

Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy's nose with only one string attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you'll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your wife you'll be having it with some old bull queer.

"Because people like you make me sick," Norton said deliberately. "I like you right where you are, Mr Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten pretty good at seeing that on a man's face. I marked it on yours the first time I walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful vessel, never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you used to walk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of those cocktail parties where the hellhound walk around coveting each others' wives and husbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you don't walk around that way anymore. And I'll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years, I'll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here."

Andy said: "The warden down there… is he a friend of yours?"

Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon's watchchain. "We are acquainted," he said.

"Why?" Andy repeated. "Can't you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn't going to talk about… about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?"

"Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investment counselling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H & R Block to tell you how to declare your extortionate income."

Warden Norton's face first went brick-red… and then all the colour fell out of it "You're going back into solitary for that Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black mark. And while you're in, think about this: if anything that's been going on should stop, the library goes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was before you came here. And I will make your life… very hard. Very difficult. You'll do the hardest time it's possible to do. You'll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for starters, and you'll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you'll lose any protection the guards have given you against the sodomites. You will… lose everything. Clear?"