I should of googled authentication instead of htaccess.  Sorry for the
noise.  Here is the solution
Basic Authentication
require 'net/http'
    Net::HTTP.start('www.example.com') {|http|
      req = Net::HTTP::Get.new('/secret-page.html')
      req.basic_auth 'account', 'password'
      response = http.request(req)
      print response.body
    }
Charlie Bowman
http://www.recentrambles.com