Bode was speculating in street-railway stocks to the extent of fifty thousand dollars.

Relihan to the same amount.

A small army of politicians and political hangers-on were on his books for various sums.

And for Edward Malia Butler he occasionally carried as high as one hundred thousand dollars in margins.
His own loans at the banks, varying from day to day on variously hypothecated securities, were as high as seven and eight hundred thousand dollars.

Like a spider in a spangled net, every thread of which he knew, had laid, had tested, he had surrounded and entangled himself in a splendid, glittering network of connections, and he was watching all the details.
His one pet idea, the thing he put more faith in than anything else, was his street-railway manipulations, and particularly his actual control of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line.