TWENTY-THREESTERN measures! That was the term for what must be taken, loose on the lips of the women. They’ve got to be made an example of. Young wives of the junior officers, new off the boat, mouthed the sentence till it turned into a kind of shibboleth, to identify the mouther as a pukka memsahib. But something more than pukkahood had set the lips of the officers in grim lines. Unless sternly dealt with, they said, the mutiny might spread first to the other companies of the regiment, then throughout the Bombay and Bengal armies. The four chapatties (unleavened bread) would be passed to the four winds—each receiver making four more, the old Indian way of spreading an alarm.
The mutinous troops were given one brief moment to reconsider, then were arrested and ironed. Now, while the other
