Free The Key to the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks

Spirit’s favourite people.”
    “Yeah,” said his father quietly. “The Chosen. Where have we heard that before?”
    Omri put the book down. “Have you found out if it’s true, what Little Bull said? Were the English being rotten?”
    His dad was silent for a moment. “You know, Om, we British were top dogs in the world for quite a long time, but top dogs often think that power is enough, and that hanging on to power is more important than behaving well. We haven’t as much to be ashamed of as a lot of colonial powers, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t anything to blush for. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Perfidious Albion’?”
    “No? What does it mean?”
    “Well, Albion was an old word for England, and perfidious of course means treacherous. In two words, it means promise-breakers, double-dealers. Englishmen always prided themselves on being men of their word, but our rulers haven’t always lived up to that. I’m sorry to say that our treatment of the Indian tribes that helped Britain in its colonial wars was not a shining example of honour.”
    “So we kind of owe them.”
    “Yes. We left our Indian allies in the lurch all right, round about 1783. But there were still decisions for the Indians to take, bad ones that led to extinction and not-so-bad ones that led to survival, at least for some. You don’t know how badly I wanted to find a way to help Little Bull to make the right one.”

8

A Different Tribe
    T he following weekend was fixed on for the preliminary camping trip.
    There was no reason at all, now, why Gillon should be excluded, and Omri had the decency, through his bad mood, to be glad of that, anyway – it would have been necessary, but mean, to scheme to keep Gillon at home if they’d been – going .
    So their mother packed them all sorts of food and drink, and they put the old tent and their grotty old school-trip sleeping bags into the boot of the Ford (their dad borrowed Adiel’s). They put on tough ratting clothes and piled washthings and spare trainers and underclothes and sweaters ready to stuff into a big rucksack their mother promised to produce from somewhere.
    And produce it she did – triumphantly, shaking the dust and spiders of ages off it in the yard. A huge, heavy thing adorned with numerous pockets, buckles and cracked leather straps.
    “It’s been among my family stuff for years. I found all sorts of strange things in it – an old solar topee and some really lovely old stuff from India.”
    Omri fingered it. It was very old indeed, and looked as if it must be about to fall apart, but when he tested it by pulling hard on the straps, nothing gave.
    “They made them to last in those days,” his mum said approvingly.
    “What’s a solar topee?”
    “A pith helmet.”
    Omri looked blank.
    “I’ll show you – follow me!”
    Omri gave the knapsack to Gillon – who stood in the yard with it dangling from his hands, as if Omri had dumped a dead dog in his arms, staring at it with incredulous disgust – and followed her into the big barn that had once been used for pigs. A room at the end was filled with his mum’s ‘family stuff’. She picked up an old cotton bag, and lifted out of it one of those thick sun-stopping hats that explorers in the tropics used to wear. It, like the knapsack, looked old and none too clean – it evenhad some spots of paint on the brim – but still usable.
    “It must have been your grandfather’s,” Omri said.
    “Matt’s. Yes, it was. All the Indian things are his.” She picked up a strange thing like five upside-down bowls made of bronze, engraved with dragons, with a cord going through the middle of them. Attached by a rotting piece of string was a stick. His mother held them up and struck them one by one. They made a pleasant bell-like sound, each a little higher than the last, till the smallest bowl at the bottom made a final musical ping .
    “Why don’t you hang that indoors, Mum? It’s nice.”
    “Okay! I’d