Murder Wears Mukluks

One fine Alaskan night, F. Millard Smyth, mild-mannered little grocer, tries on his new fur outfit. By shifting his shaving mirror from chair to floor he manages to view the ensemble-white parka, white reindeer mukluks, and white mittens. They are undoubtedly going to cause a sensation at lodge meeting and he is enjoying some modest but pleasant anticipation when he has an unpleasant visitor. By the time his guest leaves it’s too late to go to lodge meeting, but he decides to show off his finery to himself by taking a turn around the block before doing his evening chore of stoking the warehouse fire to keep his groceries from freezing. The warehouse, an abandoned dance hall standing next to his house, is a huge, dark rambling building in which he stores his grocery stock. After his lonely promenade he hesitates before entering the warehouse. Something about the malemute chorus howling across the frozen arctic wastes makes it necessary to screw up his courage. He needs it immediately-because the light he’s left burning in the warehouse is out. Slowly he gropes his way forward into the dark interior-and into more trouble than he has ever faced before. Murder, wearing soft-soled and silent mukluks, lies hidden in the gloomy darkness-and gradually creeps out to envelop the whole neighborhood. As the people in the few small houses on the street draw closer together in the face of their common fear, one is increasingly conscious of the silent, and often deadly, white wasteland which lies just beyond the frozen river. Those who have already met F. Millard Smyth in Mrs. Boyd’s Doom in the Midnight Sun, Murder Breaks Trail or One Paw Was Red will gladly follow the intrepid little grocer in this most exciting adventure of his career.