Name: Frank Shaughnessy

Height: 6', 1"

Weight: 200 lbs.

Age: 27

Hair: Blond

Eyes: Blue

Year of Birth: 1878

Frank has an outdoorsman's look about him -- tanned and quite fit -- and he moves with a casual, fluid grace that is unusual for a big man. The other immediately noticeable thing about him is his calm, seemingly unflappable demeanor.

He was born to dirt-poor Scotch-Irish tenant farmers who worked a 40-acre parcel of what was once a plantation in south Georgia. In order to escape the grinding poverty that he saw to be his lot if he stayed and worked the land, he joined the U. S. Army.

Frank saw active duty in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and rose through the ranks to become a sergeant and squad leader, but decided not to re-up when his term of enlistment expired in 1899.

He judged his only marketable skills to be what he had learned in the army, and he felt the tug of wanderlust, so he decided to become what was somewhat romantically termed in the parlance of the day, a soldier of fortune.

Tensions were running high between the Boers and the English in South Africa, so Frank shipped out to Cape Town, intending to market his services to the Dutch (his Scotch-Irish lineage made serving with the British more than a little unpalatable to him). It was in Cape Town that Frank happened to cross paths with Andrew Helms, who was in the process of putting together an expedition to journey into central Africa -- the Belgian Congo, to be precise -- on what Helms termed "a personal matter."

After speaking with Frank for a short while, Helms hired him to serve as a extra gun-hand and hunter for the expedition. Seemingly Frank impressed the great man with his skills as a shootist, or perhaps with his sangfroid, for as they parted ways after the end of the expedition, Helms said to him "Take care of yourself, Shaughnessy. I'll be in touch." Frank wasn't so sure about that, but he judged that the fact that Helms was now addressing him by name (as opposed to "Kid", which was Frank's moniker at the beginning of the expedition) to be a good sign.

After parting with Helms, Frank journeyed to the front (war had by now broken out between the Boers and the British), where he signed on with the Afrikaners. He served with a Boer commando unit during the war, specializing in conducting raids behind the English lines.

Now that the war has come to an end, Frank finds himself at loose ends once again. Apart from some meager savings, he has little more than the clothes on his back and the tools of his trade to call his own . . .