Here they saw that most of the leading chiefs of the three tribes were gathered, and they rightly concluded that a war council was being held. Four braves were posted near the camp fire, evidently for the purpose of keeping the other Indians from intruding while the chiefs and the old men discussed their plan of campaign. Among the men seated around the fire the two scouts saw the renegade Kennelly. He was smoking a big pipe, which looked incongruous in the midst of such wild and weird surroundings. His face was stained with blood from a wound in the forehead where a bullet had grazed him, and this intensified his ordinary ferocious look. Nick Wharton drew his revolver--the rifles had been left behind with Wild Bill--and in another moment would have sent a bullet through the head of the renegade, but Buffalo Bill seized his arm and signed to him to control himself. They crept nearer and nearer to the camp fire, until they were within about fifteen paces of it, lying hidden in a small clump of low brushwood. They could get no nearer, for the light of the fire brightly illuminated the surroundings, and there was no other cover. The Indians were talking angrily in the Sioux tongue, and the scouts, who were both familiar with it, were pleased to find that they were loudly abusing Kennelly for the failure of the attack on Fort Larned. One after another denounced him as a bad leader, who had betrayed them into believing that they had hardly any opposition to meet, and had then taken them up against an almost impregnable position. At last, after a young war chief had denounced him as a lying traitor, Kennelly took the pipe from between his lips and broke silence for the first time. “Listen, my brothers, and pay heed to my words, for I do not speak with a false tongue,” he said. “I told you that it would not be easy to take the fort, and that you must be willing to lose many braves in the attempt. “I told you that Long Hair, the slayer of many buffaloes, was there, and you know well that he is worth a hundred men in himself. Yet you persisted in making the attempt, and you have no right to blame me for the failure. “Did I hang back in the charge? Did I not lead your young men up to the walls of the fort? If they had followed me, we would have got inside and taken the scalps of all the men there. “It was not my fault that they reeled back and would not follow me when the big firing began. How was I to know that your warriors are nothing but women and babes?” At this gross insult half a dozen of the chiefs sprang to their feet and menaced the renegade with the tomahawks which they drew from their belts. But the Irishman, in spite of his villainy, was a brave man. He merely gazed at them contemptuously, without deigning to draw his gun, and went on: “You think that you have a quarrel with me. Very well. Name your champion, and I will meet him in single combat before you all.