Lonesome Dove, Volume 2: Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

THE SANDSTORM raged until sunset; the whirling sand seemed to magnify the sun as it sank-for a time the sand and dust even made it seem that the sun had paused in its descent. It seemed to hang just above the horizon, a great malign orb, orange at the edges but almost bluish in the center. Some of the young army men, newcomers, like their Major, to the country of sand and wind, thought something had gone wrong with nature. One private, a thin boy from Illinois, almost frozen from a day in the biting wind, thought the bluish sun meant that the world was coming to an end. He had a memory of a church in Paducah, Illinois, where he had lived as a boy, saying that the world would end with the setting of a blue sun.

The boy's name was Briarley Crisp; he was the youngest man in the troop. His mother and all his sisters wept when he left home; they all expected Briarley to be killed. Briarley had been eager, at the time, to get gone into the army, mainly to escape the plowing, which he detested. Now, looking at the ominous blue sun, its edges tinged with the orange hues of hellfire, and with the sand piling up on his eyelids so heavy he could hardly focus his eyes, Briarley knew he had made a terrible, fatal mistake. He had come all the way to Texas to be a soldier, and now the world was ending. He began to shiver so violently that his shaking caught the eye of Lieutenant Dikuss, who, though nervous himself, felt it was now his responsibility to see that morale did not falter within the troop.