The two men with guns were still some little distance from Bobby when the stampede began. One of these men was perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, the other many years his senior. They were dressed after the manner of sportsmen, and were evidently not members of the sealing crew. They did not join in the stampede as the men rushed past them in wild flight and confusion, but in utter astonishment looked for its cause in the direction from which the men had come, and discovered nothing more terrifying than Bobby, standing alone and no less astonished at what had occurred than themselves, and more than half inclined to run as fast in the opposite direction as the sealers had run toward their boats.