The Pay-Off

When Rush Henry, Chicago's ace crime reporter, joined the Marines, he took his furlough and grimly headed for home. Somewhere in the little town of Weston, cooling-off spot for many of Chicago's tougher gentry, was the answer to the "why" which had stuck in his mind for sixteen years. He meant to find that answer. And within a matter of minutes after his plane had landed in Weston, he learned that the men behind the scenes of Weston, too, meant business. Both sides were finally playing for keeps. Even Uncle Mart Bannon, the newspaper publisher who had given a home to the orphaned boy, Rush, greeted him uneasily. Only Bannon's lovely daughters, Martha and Virginia, met him with undisguised enthusiasm, with a warmth not meant to be taken for sisterly affection. Elsewhere the town of Weston preferred to drop its eyelids--and wait. All Weston knew why Rush Henry had come home. But Weston had had bitter lessons from the men who had whipped a town into line. Swift, terse and smoothly plotted, "The Pay-Off" races to a climax as surprising to the reader as it was to Rush Henry, who was looking for the answer.