Wahceta watched her charge with fear for the future. White Doe had temper, intelligence, wit, ability. She would roam the forests alone, unafraid. She knew where the bee-trees were, for even as a child she saw that the bees would gather at the basswood, and then loaded with honey would fly straight away for their homes. To follow them in their flight required a practised eye, but this White Doe had, and always the white doe followed her. She wove the inner bark of the slippery-elm into baskets, and would supply the teepee of Wahceta and Manteno with more berries, potatoes and goobers than any other teepee enjoyed.
Then she laid out gardens and tilled the soil with a wonderful wooden hoe, carved out of solid hickory with her own hands. Wahceta was growing old, and as her sight was becoming dim White Doe would lead her about through the forest and care for her as Wahceta once cared for White Doe.
The work of looking after Manteno's tent drifted by degrees into the hands of White Doe. Her industry, her thrift, her intelligence set her apart.
The Indian is like a white man in this: he allows work and responsibility to drift into the hands of those who can manage them. White Doe set about to build stone houses to replace the bark teepees. Where did she get the idea? Prenatal tendencies you say? Possibly. She drew pictures with a burnt stick on the flat surface of the cliff, and then ornamented these pictures with red and blue chalk which she dug from the ground. She took the juice of the grape, the elder and the whortleberry, and brewed them together to make wondrous colors for the pictures: and in some of the caves of North Carolina may be seen the pictures, even unto this day, drawn by White Doe. Wahceta passed away and her form was wrapped in its winding-sheet of deerskins and bark and placed high in the forks of a tree-top, awaiting the pleasure of the Great Spirit.
Manteno also died. And the people did not choose another chief—they looked to White Doe for counsel and guidance. She was their "medicine-man," in case of sickness or accident, and in health their counselor and Queen. Indians from other towns and distant came to her. She cured the sick and healed the lame.
She lived alone in a stone hut, guarded by a wolf and a bear that she had brought up from their babyhood. They followed her footsteps wherever she went, and also, too, came the white doe, fleet of foot, luminous of eye, sensitive, intelligent, seemingly intent on carrying the messages of her mistress.
White Doe, the Indian Queen, with long yellow hair, and the big, mild, yet searching blue eyes, knew her power and exercised it.
Indian braves, young and handsome, came and sat on the grass cross-legged for hours, at a discreet distance from her hut, making love to her in pantomime. They sent her presents rare and precious, of buckskins, tanned soft as velvet, nuggets of silver strung as beads and strings of wampum.
These braves she set to work down in the bottom-lands. It is said that no other person was ever able to set the male Indian to work. But for her the braves built stone houses, planted gardens, and laid stepping-stones across the fords, so that she could walk across dry-shod. The nuggets of silver that they brought her from the mountains she fashioned into an exquisite arrow of silver, sharper at the point than the sharpest flint. For days and weeks and months she worked making the silver arrow.