Choicest among these was the kiss of welcome. No man escaped it. To Graham was accorded the honor of receiving it first so that he might witness the discomfiture of the others, who, one by one, were ushered in by Dick from the patio.
Hancock, Dick's arm guiding him, came down the room to confront Paula and her sisters standing in a row on three chairs in the middle of the floor. He scanned them suspiciously, and insisted upon walking around behind them. But there seemed nothing unusual about them save that each wore a man's felt hat.
"Looks good to me," Hancock announced, as he stood on the floor before them and looked up at them.
"And it is good," Dick assured him. "As representing the ranch in its fairest aspects, they are to administer the kiss of welcome. Make your choice, Aaron."
Aaron, with a quick whirl to catch some possible lurking disaster at his back, demanded, "They are all three to kiss me?"
"No, make your choice which is to give you the kiss."
"The two I do not choose will not feel that I have discriminated against them?" Aaron insisted.
"Whiskers no objection?" was his next query.
"Not in the way at all," Lute told him. "I have always wondered what it would be like to kiss black whiskers."
"Here's where all the philosophers get kissed tonight, so hurry up," Ernestine said. "The others are waiting. I, too, have yet to be kissed by an alfalfa field."
"As if, after that, there were any choice about it," Hancock returned jauntily. "I kiss my lady--the Little Lady."
As he put up his lips, Paula bent her head forward, and, nicely directed, from the indented crown of her hat canted a glassful of water into his face.
When Leo's turn came, he bravely made his choice of Paula and nearly spoiled the show by reverently bending and kissing the hem of her gown.
"It will never do," Ernestine told him. "It must be a real kiss. Put up your lips to be kissed."
"Let the last be first and kiss me, Leo," Lute begged, to save him from his embarrassment.
He looked his gratitude, put up his lips, but without enough tilt of his head, so that he received the water from Lute's hat down the back of his neck.
"All three shall kiss me and thus shall paradise be thrice multiplied," was Terrence's way out of the difficulty; and simultaneously he received three crowns of water for his gallantry.