By this time Mr. Peniman, Lige and Joe had joined them.
"Oh," said Mr. Peniman, "buffalo peas! I have often read of them growing on the plains."
"Are they good to eat, Father?" asked Sam, who was in a chronic state of being hungry.
"I think so; we might try them. Run about and gather all you can, children; we'll cook them when we camp to-night."
With pails and baskets the young people ran about gathering the peas from the low trailing vines.
"They're the queerest peas I ever saw," said Joe; "they haven't any pods, and they're so big, look!" and he held up a round green ball about as large as a marble, pale green on one side and on the other a dull, purplish red.
When camp was struck that evening there was great interest shown in the preparation of the buffalo peas. After soaking them in water Mrs. Peniman put them on to boil with a pinch of soda, then drained off that water, put fresh water upon them, let them boil again, and when they were tender served them with a dressing of milk.
The family ate them, but it was the general opinion that the peas had grown too old to be prepared in that way, and on the next evening Mrs. Peniman made them into a pea soup, which was pronounced delicious by the entire family, and became a distinct addition to their diet as long as the buffalo-pea season lasted.
The boys had often remarked as they traveled farther and farther westward into the uninhabited wilderness that the road over which their prairie schooners rumbled was a broad, hard highway, with scarcely a blade of grass upon its surface. Joe wondered at this, and asked his father why it should be so.
"We are traveling over the old Oregon Trail, my boy," Mr. Peniman told him. "It is an old, old trail, the first highway made into the wilderness of the west by the feet of white men."