axle-grease

The hotel had two elevators whose cabins moved soundlessly through shafts of soot and axle-grease.

Jan Herman: Say Hello to Carl Weissner 2009

Limping back, she smelled again that peppery, axle-grease odor mixed in with the tang of the sawdust resin.

Asimov's Science Fiction 2003

He was all alone as far as human beings went, for Jehosophat was putting axle-grease on his little red cart, and Hepzebiah was playing with

Half-Past Seven Stories Robert Gordon Anderson

It used to be that on a Saturday evening the Young Gent would draw down his six dollars worth of salary and chase himself to the barber shop, where the Bolivian lawn trimmer would put a crimp in his mustache and plaster his forehead with three cents worth of hair and a dollar's worth of axle-grease.

You Should Worry Says John Henry Hugh McHugh

Swearing at his horses, wheels squealing for axle-grease, tin pans rattling and flashing in the hot morning sun, a settler with a family stopped one day to ask questions of the two young men.

Deep Furrows Hopkins Moorhouse

Unless you drop off just before the terminus, which hurts, the same objection arises as in the under-the-seat method; and in any case you are practically certain to be spotted not only by the officials of the railway company concerned but with axle-grease.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, 1920-07-28 Various

Just at present you are making your hair foul with some sort of perfumed axle-grease; nine tenths of you part it in the middle.

The Plastic Age Percy Marks 1923

The station was surrounded with soap-less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale all sizes of the little wooden boxes of the chief local product, in appearance like axle-grease, but delicious far beyond its looks, and with vendors of everything imaginable, to say nothing of a ragged, dirty multitude of all ages with no business there -- nor anywhere else.

Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond Harry Alverson Franck 1921

He cut a big wooden boot out of the side of an empty box, painted it black with axle-grease and soot, hung it up over the door, and announced himself as ready to do all the cobbling and harness-repairing he could get ... and a fine workman he showed himself to be.

Hillsboro People Dorothy Canfield Fisher 1918

While she was down, I made Green and Dab rub her heavily with axle-grease.

A Woman Rice Planter 1914