In the Face of Danger Read Online Free

carefully. “I think that Megan’s one to face facts, and the fact is that out on the land we do watch for rattlers.”
    “I’ve never met up with a snake,” Megan said, “but my brother Mike once showed me a drawing of a fearful big snake. He said it swallowed people.”
    Ben chuckled. “Brothers have a way of making their stories more exciting than they should be. No, rattlesnakes don’t swallow people, but they do strike at them and bite them, and there is venom in their bite that makes people sicken and die. I’ll teach you what rattlers look like and how to listen for their warning rattle.”
    “That’s fine to know,” Megan said, “but you had better tell me what to do next, too.”
    “Well, that’s easy. You get out of the snake’s way or kill it.”
    “How do you kill it? Thea said something about a hoe. Is that something to kill rattlesnakes with?”
    “Good gracious,” Emma said. “All this talk about snakes.Wouldn’t you rather talk about something else for a while?”
    Megan shook her head. “I would rather talk about
anything
else, but only after I’ve learned how to kill rattlesnakes.”
    “Very well,” Ben said. “A hoe is a metal blade attached to a long wooden handle. It’s used to break up the soil in the garden and to tear up weeds. You can also raise it high in the air and bring it down hard on a rattlesnake, aiming—if possible—right behind its head.”
    “Will the hoe cut off its head?”
    “Usually.”
    Megan shuddered at the mental image Ben’s words called up, but what he said made good sense. “All right,” she said. “Now we can talk about something else.”
    Ben chuckled. “You’re the kind of woman who’ll turn this wild prairie into good farmland.”
    “Megan’s a treasure,” Emma said. “We’re so lucky to have her!”
    Lucky?
The gypsy cackled slyly in Megan’s mind. Megan shivered and pushed the thought away, hoping that Emma hadn’t noticed her distress.
    “Let me tell you about your new home,” Emma said. “We began in a house dug into the side of a hill. You’ll see many houses like that with families living in them. But now we have a house of logs.”
    “Like the Parsons’ house?”
    “Like it, but larger. We have a big room for living—a parlor and kitchen combined—and we have two bedrooms on the side, with a front door in the parlor and a back door in the kitchen area.” Emma smiled at Ben with pride. “Ben built most of it himself, with a little help from a near neighbor in putting on the roof.”
    “Emma did much of the caulking,” Ben said. He glancedat Megan. “Caulking means stuffing all the gaps and chinks between the logs with wet clay to keep out the cold and the winds.”
    Emma sighed. “There’ve been droughts that hurt many of the farmers, especially in the western part of the territory, so I feel we’ve been very lucky to have good healthy crops of corn for the past two years. We’ve been able to put real glass in our windows. And we have a well, so we don’t have to carry water from the river.”
    “Didn’t you need water to grow the corn?” Megan interrupted.
    Again Emma glanced proudly at Ben. “Any crop needs water. Luckily some of our land is high and dry and some of it is fine bottomland near the river. Ben planted the cornfield on the bottomland, then dug a canal to bring river water to the cornfield. Ben is very clever.”
    “Why doesn’t everyone live by the river?” Megan asked.
    “Because of the mosquitoes, which swarm near the water and carry disease,” Ben said. “Also, if the weather were to change and it rained hard enough and the river rose high enough, a flood could take the house. That’s why our house is on a rise, a distance from the river.”
    “You could lose the cornfield if the river flooded.”
    “That’s true. We have to take some chances.”
    Megan thought a moment and said, “It seems that you’d never be sure whether you’d have good crops or not.”
    “Maybe you