The story is a pastoral history told by an omniscient narrator more than 50 years after the event. The sheep-stealer is a kind of folk hero who stole to survive and escaped by outsmarting his hangman.

A party of 19 people is assembled in Higher Crowstairs, a shepherd's cottage near Casterbridge. A stranger joins them to seek shelter for the rough weather. A second stranger comes in and sings a song that reveals he's a hangman. A third strangers enters briefly, but then flees.

They are interrupted by a gunshot, a signal that means a prisoner has escaped. The people leave the cottage to seek the third stranger and arrest him. They bring him back to the shepherd's house, but he turns out to be the wrong man. The first stranger was the actual convict, Timothy Summers, an impovershed man who stole sheep. The third stranger was his brother. The conclusion is: there won't be a hanging in the morning.

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.