Naturally, every other possibility came to be considered. It was at first believed that the _Patriot_ might have been taken by a British man-of-war and held on account of her previous activities. Before this could be disproved it was suggested that the schooner might readily have been attacked by pirates, since her guns were stored below decks, and Mrs. Alston taken prisoner. Since there were still a few buccaneers in Southern waters, who sporadically took advantage of the preoccupation of the maritime powers with their wars, this theory of Theodosia Alston’s disappearance gained many adherents, chiefly among the romantics, it is true. But the possibility of such a thing was also seriously considered by the husband and for a time by the father, who hoped the unfortunate woman might have been taken to one of the lesser West Indies by some not unfeeling corsair. Surely, she would soon or late make her escape and win her way back to her dear ones. In the end Burr rejected this idea, too. [Illustration: ~~ THEODOSIA BURR ~~] “No, no,” he said to a friend who revived the fable of the pirates, “she is indeed dead. Were she alive all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father.” But the mystery persisted and so the rumors and stories would not down. For a number of years after 1813 the newspapers contained, from time to time, reports from various parts of the world, generally to the effect that a beautiful and cultured woman had been seen aboard a ship supposed to be manned by pirates, that such a woman had been found in a colony of sea refugees in some vaguely described West Indian or South American retreat, or that a woman of English or American characteristics was being detained in an island prison, whither she had been consigned along with a captured piratical crew. The woman was always, by inference at least, Theodosia Burr. Nor were the persevering Burr calumniators idle, a circumstance which seems to testify to the fear his enemies must have had of this strange and greatly mistaken man. Theodosia Burr had been seen in Europe in company with a British naval officer who was paying her marked attentions; she had been located on an island off Panama, where she was living in contentment as the wife of a buccaneer; she was known to be in Mexico with a new husband who had first been her captor, then her lover and now was in the southern Republic trying to revive Burr’s dream of empire.