Young Dick was too impatient and too skeptical to wait until the end of the war, and, to the amazement of his aunts and the amusement of Acredale, he carried Rosa off, one day, and was secretly married in the rector's study at Warchester, so that his first son was born under the Stars and Bars in Richmond, while Dick was beleaguering the walls at Fort Walthall, four miles away.