Ash Road Read Online Free Page B

By car it was about fourteen miles from Tinley to Ash Road; across the ranges in a straight line it was no more than six or seven.
    Ash Road didn’t go anywhere in particular. It branched off the highway opposite the water-storage reservoir in Prescott Vale—the Prescott Vale Dam—and ended in the bush about two miles farther east. That was the way Ash Road was on the fierce morning of Saturday, 13th January. That was the way it had been, more or less, for a very long time.
    The dam hadn’t always been there, nor had many of the other landmarks that had become familiar over the years. Tanner’s, the oldest house still standing, had been built soon after the turn of the century. The chestnut trees were at Tanner’s—tremendous trees, known for generations to every child in miles. Fairhall’s place had gone up about 1919. Hobson had planted his apple orchard in 1925. Collins had established his nursery in 1937, and after the war at different times had come the Robertsons, the Georges, the Pinkards, the Buckinghams. Those families, their homes, their farms, and their children were the landmarks of Ash Road.
    It hadn’t always been called Ash Road. At the start—no one was sure when—it had been a track to a settler’s hut. No one knew the name of the settler any more or where his hut had been. Later it had been used as a road to the gold diggings. Not many people knew of the diggings any more, either. The shafts had caved in or grown over. Old-timers, in their youth, had dropped dead horses down the shafts to spare themselves the effort of digging pits; but now, apart from a pony or two, there wasn’t a horse to be found from one end of Ash Road to the other and only one genuine old-timer, Grandpa Tanner. Most of the giant mountain ashes had gone, too. A few were left along the roadside, standing here and there among lesser trees, but their days seemed to be numbered. They were a constant danger to power lines and telephone lines, and, had it not been for the unyielding stubbornness and vigilance of the residents of Ash Road, one authority or another would have felled them years ago.
    There were several look-outs on the surrounding hills from which one could see down most of the gravelled length of Ash Road. It was predominantly red in colour, with four distinct bends and two steep dips, flanked on either side by a maze of creeks and springs. Oddly enough, the road was at its lowest at the farthermost point from the dam. There it ran out into the unspoiled bush, and there the Pinkards grazed a few cattle on eighty rough acres. (The Pinkards lived in the city and came up sometimes at weekends.) Back towards the dam, where the land improved, a second generation of Hobsons tended the apple orchard and the Georges grew carrots for the city market and berries for the local jam factory. Farther up the long hill, just short of the crossroad that provided the quickest route into Prescott, were the Fairhalls, the Buckinghams, and Grandpa Tanner, in a group. Adjoining Grandpa Tanner’s was a thirty-acre potato paddock, curiously contoured, lying fallow. There the brow of the hill subsided sharply into the source of a spring. On flatter land, still closer to the dam, were about two hundred acres of scrub and timber out of which the nurserymen, James Collins and Sons, cut new ground year by year as their business grew. They owned land on both sides of the road. The Robertsons had a ten-acre corner opposite the dam with their main frontage to the highway. The highway skirted the dam for about eight miles. Bill Robertson was a fuel merchant. He had an agency for petroleum products and a contract for the supply of firewood to a number of suburban depots.
    That was all there was to Ash Road; except that at daybreak on the morning of Saturday, 13th January, it lay only six and a half miles across country from Tinley, a fact of which its residents were strangely unaware. The roads through the