I just located my copy of the memoir of Edwin Carpenter, written in 1886, otherwise I would have referenced this earlier. Carpenter belonged to Company K, 17th Illinois Cavalry. I haven't looked this memoir over in six or seven years, so my memory was sketchy in regard to Carpenter's take on Centralia. This very rare memoir is the most detailed history of the regiment in existence and includes a mass of otherwise unpublished, unreported information on 1864 guerrilla warfare in north Missouri. The Carpenter memoir includes 37 chapters written by Carpenter (some sections of which encapsulate correspondence on the wartime recollections of some of his comrades from the 17th Illinois), as well as a two chapter history of the 17th Illinois Cavalry extracted from a report of the Illinois Adjutant General.
I'm not finding anything in the memoir in regard to an engagement occurring Sept. 22, 1864. However, at Chapter XIII, Carpenter touches upon the guerrilla attacks on Federal troops in the Goslin's Lane fight (23 Sept. 1864) and then the Fayette fight (24 Sept. 1864), after which the 17th Illinois took up the pursuit. Here is what Carpenter writes, immediately after his discussion of Fayette--
"Truth. Truth. Truth. Almost twenty of Anderson's men were wounded, and were beaten, full three hundred of them. On the boys went after Anderson, but they scattered, re-met and captured a train at Centralia, Mo., in which were twenty sick soldiers, all of whom were killed, a 17th being one among them. To their rescue went Major Johnson, who was commanding some raw, one year, state troops, finding Anderson, two miles south of Centralia, near Singleton's barn...."